james, joyce, and others

UNIVERSITYOF FLORIDALIBRARIES

COLLEGE LIBRARY

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JAMES, JOYCE, AND OTHERS

James, Joyce,

and Others

By

A. J. A. WALDOCKProfessor of English Literature in the University of Sydney

Essay Index Reprint Series

Originally published by:

WILLIAMS & NORGATE LTD,

BOOKS FOR LIBRARIES PRESS, INC.

FREEPORT, NEW YORK

First published 1937

Reprinted 1967

Reprinted from a copy in the collections of

The New York Public Library

Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

-

CONTENTS1. HENRY JAMES ....2. JAMES JOYCE ....3. THOMAS HARDY AND c THE DYNASTS '

4. WILLIAM LISLE BOWLES

5. 'MACBETH' ...

PAGE

I

53

79

104


HENRY JAMES

If one reads (as one may, in old numbers of The

Atlantic Monthly and other magazines) the earliest

reviews that Henry James wrote, one sees that before

he had reached his middle twenties he had formed

some notion of what the ideal novel should be. Tomake this notion quite clear to himself, to realise all

its implications and express them in his own work,

was, speaking quite literally, the occupation and the

joy of his lifetime. He just succeeded within his

lifetime—which was a long one—in accomplishing

his purpose. His last three completed novels, the

novels of his elderly years

—

The Wings of the Dove,

The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl—are the final

embodiment of that idea of the novel with which,

so many years before, he began ; and his progress,

throughout all that time, was towards these three

great books. There were lapses, naturally, but the

line was always upward and upward. The last

three finished novels are not quite the latest workwe have from him. He left two fragments, The

Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past. The war broke

into both these books, broke into him, indeed, andleft him for a while almost sapped of his " sacred


rage," so that what at another time would have

absorbed all his zest seemed in some of these dark

moments a mere playing with " fiddlesticks." It is

clear, however, that neither of the two unfinished

novels would have shown any further important

advances in technique ; we may regret their

incompleteness, for all that. The Sense of the Past, in

particular, would have been one of the most

charming of all his excursions into the phantasmal

world ; in the theme of this book James seemed to

find a certain relief from the numbing pressure of

events, and could plunge himself into the writing of

it with some of the old exhilaration.

But, technically, he had, no doubt, reached his

goal. He could go no farther, and, as it was, hadalready gone too far for the majority of his readers,

who for some time past had found their powers

of endurance increasingly taxed. James watched

them, as one by one they fell off, with a humoroussadness

—" ruefulness " is his word—until even the

elect began to fail him. It was, indeed, an un-

relenting progress, and drastic in more than one

way. When the time came for the preparation of

the massive New York edition of 1908, the earlier

work was treated ruthlessly. Some delightful novels

—even The Bostonians, even Washington Square—were

excluded, at least temporarily, from the canon ;

others, such as The American and Roderick Hudson,

were mercilessly revised. Edmund Gosse was but

one sensitive critic who protested at the treatment

which old favourites were seen to be receiving ;

when it was clear that even delicate stories like Daisy

HENRY JAMES

Miller were not to be spared, some degree of horror

came to be mingled with the protests. And James,

for his part, was hurt by such objections—even a

little resentful of them ; for to him there was noquestion of what was right, and the obtuseness of

his friends made him suffer.

These revisions (to pause on them for a moment)are very interesting, admitting one as they do to a

sight of Henry James at work. Their effect is by nomeans limited to a superficial re-touching of the

style, though it is often suggested that the aim was

no more than that. " Mr. Newman," remarked

E. F. Hale, " seems an American gentleman who in

the Seventies had had ihe advantage of reading

Mr. James's later writing." Once he held that" love made a fool of a man "

; now that condition

is, for him, " too consistent with asininity." But

really the alterations go quite beyond " style " in

tne restricted sense, and amount to nothing less than

an effort to impose the later technique on the earlier

material. To James's mature eye a novel like The

American seemed only half-written : as if the bookbehind or underneath the printed words had never

yet been brought into full existence. He tells us of

his experiences in re-reading the early novels ; in

some cases the task of revision seemed patently

impossible and he did not attempt it ; in others,

and in varying degrees in each, it was a question of

going over the writing inch by inch until, as far as

could be, the true life of the book was made actual

and visible. Only patient comparison can reveal

the magnitude of such an undertaking and show the


many results he was trying to achieve. The methodof narration is itself altered, so that in The American,

for instance, by countless minute changes ofphrasing,

the whole story is pressed back more fully into the

mind of the hero Newman : it is through his

" delegated sensibility " that we are to receive our

report, and the author's own " guarantee," so

frequently offered in the original, is now ruthlessly

torn up. In short, James does what he can to

re-write The American in the manner of The Ambassa-

dors, It was a task that could not be completely

achieved, but he would have considered it a betrayal

of his artistic faith not to make the attempt. Hetries, thus, to improve the structure by importing

innumerable phrases of the form " as he would have

said," " as he might have called it," " as he namedit to himself." Such details are not trivial, for their

cumulative effect is to move the account one degree

back. Everywhere the assertion of the author is

avoided, or at least softened, and his intrusiveness

checked : a mere statement of a fact becomes a

report of an impression of Newman's. " He flat-

tered himself that he was not in love, but his bio-

grapher may be supposed to know better ": this

was " sorry business " to the later James, and all

clumsiness of the sort had to be reshaped or replaced.

It is like a great feat of engineering : a huge fabric

from top to bottom must be overhauled, the strains

and stresses examined and redistributed, every

weakness buttressed, every unsoundness corrected.

So, for another example out of dozens of the kind,

we had been told of Newman and of Madame de

HENRY JAMES

Cintre that " whether or no he did occasionally

bore her, it is probable that on the whole she liked

him only the better for his absence of embarrassed

scruples." In the revised version we are told

nothing so directly : it is recorded, instead, that" he seemed at least to know that even if she actually

suffered she liked him better, on the whole, with too

few fears than with too many." The narrator's

self-denying ordinance is exhibited clearly here :

he will not, he must not—indeed, in accordance

with his self-imposed law he cannot—tell us whatMadame de Cintre liked or did not like ; all he

can legitimately tell us is what Newman imagined

she liked, or what he seemed to think she felt.

To " stick to the logical centre "—it is now the

rule of rules.

But all the changes, whatever their nature in

detail, are informed by one principle, lead to one

end ; it is the search for full truth of statement that

controls them; James is engaged in intensifying the

expression of a theme previously, but not to his

mature judgment " entirely," expressed. He hadbecome, for one thing, wiser in the interval and his

deepened understanding—the edge his perceptions

had taken from all the " wear and tear of dis-

crimination "—shows in many a substitution. " It

is a proof of cleverness," Newman had said, " to behappy without doing anything." Of cleverness

only ? In the new version the word is changed : it

becomes " power." In the old text Newman andMadame de Cintre are talking of the detestation in

which he, the American, is held by her family :


" I don't strike myself as a man to hate," he says.

Madame de Cintre replies : "I suppose that a manwho may be liked may also be disliked." It is a

commonplace remark. Compare the precision of

the new rendering, which offers a new meaning, or

says for the first time what was meant :" ' I suppose

a man who may inspire strong feelings,' she thought-

fully opined, ' must take his chance of what they

are '." The speakers have become, in truth, morethoughtful—more capable, too, of defining whatthey think.

They have become, also, more visible. Often, in

the dialogue, a bare record will be enriched with

notations of look and demeanour, so that, where

before we listened merely, now we both watch andlisten :

Old version : " ' Yes, she is very beautiful,' said

Newman."New version : " ' Yes, she is very beautiful,' said

Newman, while he covered Claire with his bright

still protection."

We read his eyes as he speaks. Again :

Old version :" ' No, they don't,' she said."

New version :"

' Scarcely,' she said, with the

gentlest, oddest distinctness."

The meaning is augmented and sharpened here,

for the context makes plain the point of that evasive

annotation. Sometimes the words of the dialogue

are abandoned and, for more significance, replaced

by a description of gesture and look :

Old version : " ' That's a poor reason,' said Madamede Cintre, smiling."

6

HENRY JAMES

New version :" She gave, still with her charming

eyes on him, the slowest, gentlest headshake."

Imagery, too, is much more fully used than before,

and again, the effect (though occasionally at someloss of ease and simplicity) is of enrichment. In the

original American Newman listens to Madame de

Cintre as she talks affectionately of her brother

—

" listened sometimes with a certain harmless

jealousy ; he would have liked to divert some of her

tender allusions to his own credit." The figure, if

figure there be, conveys little ; but observe the

precision and fullness of the new rendering :

" Newman listened sometimes with a vague irre-

pressible pang ; if he could only have caught in his

own cup a few drops of that overflow !" These

are the touches—and they are innumerable—that

lift The American into completer existence.

Daisy Miller was a different matter. The addedcommentary can often, it is true, illumine andintensify here as it did in The American. The por-

traiture, for instance, of Mrs. Miller—Daisy's

dreamily remote mother—is completed by the

changes. But the possibilities of enriching the

substance of this story were fewer, and the dangers

of injury to the exquisite light grace of the original

expression much greater. James's taste had altered

in many little ways : he had come, for example, to

dislike intensely the " said's " and " replied's " of

dialogue and makes it now a point of honour to

avoid them : and even changes of this kind seem a

heaviness on the story of Daisy Miller. " When she

heard Wihterbourne's voice she quickly turned her


head. ' Well, I declare !' she said. ' I told you I

should come, you know,' Winterbourne rejoined,

smiling." Such straightforwardness made the

mature HenryJames wince. Elaborately he circum-

vents these commonplace formulae :" Daisy was

engaged in some pretty babble with her hostess, but

when she heard Winterbourne's voice she quickly

turned her head with a ' Well, I declare !' which

he met smiling. ' I told you I should come, youknow '." And there are many places—apart from

details of this kind—where one feels that a freshness

has been spoilt by the attempt at a fuller rendering,

a naturalness sacrificed without a compensating

gain. Winterbourne asks Daisy, ceremoniously, to

row with him on the lake :" She only stood there

laughing." It is enough to give us the picture : weknow, with what has gone before, exactly why she

laughs. The new version spoils the simplicity :

" She only remained an elegant image of free light

irony."

The story is a little disfigured, too, by quite a

different type of change. James came to feel that

he must secure colloquial fidelity and make his

Americans speak in appropriate dialect : he does

it by sprinkling " ain't's " and " guesses " through

their talk. We feel, even in The American,) that such

alterations accomplish very little and were a pity,

but in Daisy Miller they seem a real blemish. Before,

young Randolph was content to say of his sister,

" She's an American girl "; now he adds, " You

bet." Before, he said " to Italy," " to America ";

now he says " t'Italy," " t'America." Before, he

8

HENRY JAMES

said " I am going to the Pincio "; now he says " I

am going to go it on the Pincio." Randolph is anamusing and irresponsible urchin, and it is not

perhaps of much account to us just how his " harsh

little voice " framed its syllables ; but we wish that

the dainty lips of his sister had continued to say" isn't " and not " ain't."

But all such changes, for better or worse, camelater. It is interesting to turn back for a little to

the earlier manner—or, for a really sensational

contrast, to the earliest. One may find in The

Atlantic Monthly for March, 1865, a small piece of

fiction from the pen of the very young Henry James.It is called The Story of a Year, and might quite as

easily have made its appearance in The Qyiver. It

is a sentimental romance of the days of Civil War :

of a girl and her soldier-lover and her change of

heart in his absence, and of the happy ending

despite the sadness ; but the interest is in the

method of it. It abounds in apostrophes—

" Alas,

Elizabeth, that you had no mother !"—in moralis-

ings, and every kind of free intrusion on the part

of the author. He will intersperse some general

reflections and then take his reader confidentially

by the arm :" Good reader, this narrative is averse

to retrospect ..." The story makes one laugh, as

quaint old unrecognisable photographs of a person

one knows very well make one laugh ; rub one's

eyes as one will, it is impossible to catch the faintest

resemblance, to discover even a sign that mightidentify the author of this story with Henry James.And the same is true—or nearly true—of everything


he published within the next few years ; there were

many short stories for the magazines, hardly any of

them reprinted.

Ten years and more went by before he was ready

to write a full-length novel. Then, with Roderick

Hudson, he began a series that went on for a dozen

years or so ; through all this period his method wasdeveloping, but not altering greatly. He advanced

from The American to The Portrait of a Lady, and from

that again to The Tragic Muse, In The Tragic Muse

(1890) faint indications may be observed, especially

in the management of the conversations, of anapproaching change of some magnitude : little

ruffles appear on the style suggesting a breeze from

a new direction. The theatre still attracted himand it was in these years that he made his most

valiant efforts to write a successful drama ; but the

time for that had long since passed. The developed

mannerism, if there had been no other disabilities,

disqualified him positively from now on for theatrical

work. His dialogue—the vague hintings, the obscure

circlings—had become impossible for practical use

on the stage : a glance at almost any page of almost

any of the later plays will prove that. He returned

then from such disappointments to his main occu-

pation, and in The Spoils of Poynton his final methodis well in evidence. He was now clearly committed

to it. In the last years of the century he wrote The

Awkward Age, one of the most difficult of all the

novels. Then in 1902 came The Wings of the Dove ;

after that, in successive years, The Ambassadors and

The Golden Bowl.

10

HENRY JAMES

Let us dwell for a little, however, on the middle

years, say 1876 to 1890, the period that begins with

Roderick Hudson and ends with The Tragic Muse.

Here, no doubt, will always be found James's most

popular books. They are in the main straight-

forward, and, apart from the relief their clarity

affords, possess many attractions. The best of them—and none can be placed higher than The Portrait

ofa Lady—have a suave and genial loveliness, curious

to compare with the more difficult beauty of the

later books, and especially of the last three. Thegulf between the two styles is really amazing ; in

the final period James is more intensely, moresombrely, preoccupied—has settled thoroughly to

the business of his art, which has at the same time

some of the marks of a religion. In the earlier phase

the earnestness, though it is there, is not so profound,

and the reader benefits by the lighter demands onhim. The manner itself ;

: very different—lucid,

pointed, fresh, with a crisp tingle to it. In these

earlier books the stream runs sparkling and limpid,

though it has deeps ; later we feel ourselves carried

on slow-moving fathomless rivers, full of strange

eddies and involved swirls. The earlier style is not

distinguished by image—which became James's

chief resource in expression, indeed the only

technique adequate to the infinite refinements of his

meaning—but rather by a certain tang in the

language that may amount at times to epigram.

Chapters are often made to end with a little sharp

snap—almost an audible click—of surprise or irony

or paradox, some tart rejoinder by a character, someJ.J.O.

j jB


spirited comment from the author, so that certain of

the conclusions remind one of the laugh upon whicha curtain falls. James's taste altered in this regard,

and it is very curious to notice how often, in the

course of his revisions, he will seem to go out of his

way to burr the point of an over-sharp phrase, andwill take the neatness out of quite a mild antithesis.

Winterbourne (of Daisy Miller), musing at night

amid the ruins " remembered that if nocturnal

meditations in the Colosseum are recommended bythe poets they are deprecated by the doctors." Eventhe harmless sting of that playful remark wasextracted : Winterbourne, in the later text, rather

heavily " remembered that if nocturnal meditation

thereabouts was the fruit of a rich literary culture

it was none the less deprecated by medical science.5 '

Nevertheless much of the original flavour remains

even in the revised texts. The effects are not readily

detachable, depending as they do on dozens of

associations that only the whole novel can supply.

But we have many whimsical exactitudes of this

kind : the heroine of The Bostonians, faintly amusedby a thought, makes " a vague sound in her throat

—a sort of pensive, private reference to the idea of

laughter." Mrs. Farrinder, in the same novel, is a

leader of feminists with an imposing presence

suggestive of the public-platforms on which she

spends so much of her life : she " at almost anytime had the air of being introduced by a few

remarks." Often there will be an ironic sparkle :

the heroine of Washington Square is " affectionate,

docile, obedient and much addicted to speaking the

12

HENRY JAMES

truth "; Mr. Goodwood, in The Portrait of a Lady,

" speaks a good deal, but he doesn't talk." This

kind of vivacity is quite foreign to the later James.

The heroine of The Portrait of a Lady is " mistress of

a wedge of brown-stone violently driven into Fifty-

Third Street." Sometimes, again, a pungency will

sharpen a more serious perception :" There's

nothing makes us feel so much alive as to see others

die. That's the sensation of life—the sense that weremain."

And in these earlier books there are other relaxa-

tions : diversions of various kinds, little scraps of

recorded observation that give pleasure by the way.

We need expect no such relief in the later novels;

there the rigour closes down. But here James will

introduce many a note, of comment or description,

that refreshes the mind and remains agreeably in

the memory : like the account of the little Americanboy, brought up in a French school, whose native

speech became so strongly influenced by the French

idiom of his playmates that he would talk of

being " defended " to go near the water, and of

the necessity of " obeying to " his nurse : a veritable

trifle, yet a trifle that gives the mind a moment'sholiday. No novel is so full of such refreshment as

The Portrait of a Lady : that was partly deliberate

(James did nothing unconsciously) for he suspected

a possible " thinness " in the theme, and to " supply"

it brought in the " group of attendants and enter-

tainers " and " little touches and inventions andenhancements ' besides, for our amusement. Theresult shows what he could do in such ways when he

13


wished—in light caricature, and satiric or pathetic

or humorous delineation ; no novel of his is so rich

in interest.

But, of course, as he would have demurred, that

word " interest " begs the whole question. The" liveliness " that marks The Portrait of a Lady was,

in a sense, a concession, and as time went on he

felt himself less and less inclined to make con-

cessions ; his own interest was too strongly held

elsewhere.

Henry James's latest manner has two main dis-

tinguishing features : there is the idiosyncrasy of

style, and there is the new method.

As for the style, it became almost a dialect ; so

much so that on rare occasions the effect may even

be a little like that of a hoax. His expression becameso specialised for subtleties that he was as if com-pelled to express any idea subtly : it is possible, at

moments, to demonstrate that the complication is

purely in the expression. But that is exceptional.

In general, it was an instrument wonderfully per-

fected for his needs. It is difficult to isolate its special

character or to find for it, in any one image, a

suitable likeness. At moments the mind is recalled,

unwillingly, to Mr. H. G. Wells's irresistible picture

ofHenryJames " clambering over huge metaphors ";

the description possesses at least the truth of

caricature ; and yet how rarely do these late

metaphors fail to justify themselves. I may quote

one further instance from the revised American.

Newman, at Madame de Cintre's receptions, has a

habit of listening and of saying little ; he is not

14

HENRY JAMES

bored, neither is he absent-minded : but the precise

quality of these " silent sessions " of his remains, in

the original text, a little vague. The truth is that

James's resources in expression were not at the time

quite equal to conveying the subtlety. There is only

one way in which it can be conveyed—by an image,

and an elaborate image at that. We see, then, howthe laterJames comes to the rescue :

" The MarquiseUrbain had once found occasion to declare to himthat he reminded her, in company, of a swimming-master she had once had who would never himself

go into the water and who yet, at the baths, en

costume de ville, managed to control and direct the

floundering scene without so much as getting

splashed. He had so made her angry, she professed,

when he turned her awkwardness to ridicule.

Newman affected her in like manner as keeping

much too dry : it was urgent for her that he should

be splashed—otherwise what was he doing at the

baths ?—and she even hoped to get him into the

water."

But perhaps the most lasting impression that the

style leaves in the mind is that of a certain regenerat-

ing power : it seems to possess a principle of life bywhich it expands and grows and sprouts and buds :

before our eyes, an idea comes into being, develops,

divides itself, multiplies. Here, for a second example,

is a passage from the very late autobiographical

volume, The Middle Tears ; James is speaking of the

notion of the " end of one's youth," and of whatmeaning the phrase may contain :

" We are never old, that is, we never cease easily

15


to be young, for all life at the same time : youth is

an army, the whole battalion of our faculties andour freshness, our passion and our illusions, on a

considerably reluctant march into the enemy's

country, the country of the general lost freshness;

and I think it throws out at least as many stragglers

behind as skirmishers ahead—stragglers who often

catch up but belatedly with the main body, andeven in many a case never catch up at all. Or underanother figure it is a book in several volumes, andeven at this a mere instalment of a large library of

life, with a volume here and there closing, as some-

thing in the clap of its covers may assure us, while

another remains either completely agape or kept

open by a fond finger thrust in between the leaves."

It was, as well, a perfectly natural style, in the

sense of being quite spontaneous and personal. Heused, as his friends tell, to converse in much the

same way, so that to listen to his casual talk wasoften to have the sensation of " being present at the

actual construction of a little palace of thought."

The description is A. C. Benson's, who adds that

voice and gesture would make plain what on a page

might have been tough and coagulated. Then there

were the favourite expressions. Certain words in

James could almost be used as a test of period, were

other evidence wanting : one is " bristle," another

is " portentous." The Portrait of a Lady can hardly

furnish more than a stray example of each : but

count them in The Golden Bowl or in any later

preface ! One other element of vocabulary is

curious. To the very end, and even when he is

16

HENRY JAMES

writing in his manner of extreme elaborateness, he

likes to bring in a colloquialism. He declines as a

rule to assume responsibility for it : he will handle

it daintily between inverted commas, or else transfer

his guilt to a character (" She would be hanged

—

she conversed with herself in strong language

—

if . . . "), but he will relish it nevertheless. It is a

liking that accords with his fancy for imagery of the

homeliest kind : he will turn very ordinary things

to metaphor in the most luxurious fashion. But, of

course, the truth is that his style was, in an essential

way, colloquial ; it was the style of his novels, his

letters ("a friendly bulletin would produce a docu-

ment like a great tapestry ") and his speech ; not

his native utterance, but the utterance that hadbecome, by acquirement, his one natural, and indeed

his only possible, mode of expression. We know,

too, that his latest novels were actually talked—to

his secretary.

But they were not only talked, they were talked

over : talked over aloud while his secretary—this

was before the final dictation—took down all that

he said. We have in printed form the record of two

such preliminary discussions : they concern the

unfinished novels, The Ivory Tower and The Sense of

the Past ; it was his custom, when a novel wasfinished, to destroy these notes. Analogous docu-

ments must exist, but I doubt whether a novelist has

ever given a more fascinating glimpse of himself at

work than James in these survivals. They are not

first drafts, they are informal self-communings.

That is their special interest and the quality that

17


makes them even more revealing than the prefaces.

The prefaces, after the event, retrace the procedure,

but these notes—James called them " rough

scenarios "—show a novel in the living processes of

creation ; the pains, the joys, the anxieties, the

hesitations, the seekings, the findings are there for

us, as James thinks aloud ; for that is precisely whatin these notes he does. The full interest is only to

be gained, naturally, by a comparison of the notes

with what was completed of the work ; but even in

themselves they give a sense of the adventure that

writing was for him. It was adventure all the time—" high amusement "—and actually the record

takes on the form at times of a little drama. Welisten to him, for example, as he walks up and downin the study at Lamb House, pondering The Sense of

the Past. There is some little difficulty with the plot,

a special connection he wants, a " clou d'argent"

that at first will not come to his hand ; so he puts

the matter aside for a moment with a reminder to

himself, " Find it, find it." Presently he returns to

it :" It must consist of something he [the hero] has

to do, some condition he has to execute, somemoment he has to traverse, or rite or sacrifice he has

to perform, say even some liability he has to face."

Then, as he murmurs to himself the word liability,

he feels himself " warmer ": he is coming nearer

to what he requires. " I seem to see it " (his voice

must have rendered these excitements), " it glimmers

upon me. When I call it a liability I seem to catch

it by the tip of the tail." But for a while it was still

elusive. " Let me figure it out a bit," he goes on,

18

HENRY JAMES

a and under gentle, or rather patiently firm, direct

pressure, it will come out." So, presently, it does,

and we have an exclamation of triumph, " That's

it, that's it." 1

All the ups and downs, all the varying fortunes,

are recorded, for the talk, as will be seen, is abso-

lutely to himself (his secretary merely overhearing)

and therefore utterly informal. There is no attempt

at " style," though it is amusing to observe how the

idiom comes through nevertheless, often heightening

and caricaturing itself in vast convolutions andheapings up of adjective and adverb, 2 as Jamesexperiments with one word after another to see

what stimulus for his imagination may lurk in it.

Nor is the experience merely intellectual : James in

these moments is living very fully and his emotions

are deeply engaged. " Oh," he will burst out, " I

see somehow such beautiful things that I can hardly

keep step with myself to expatiate and adumbrate

coherently enough." But it is not all triumph. Hehas worries, doubts—an occasional sharp fright. In

the midst of his elation he will suddenly be pulled

up by the thought of something wrong—a difficulty

1 The idea, as James worked it out, was this : the man of TheSense of the Past becomes aware, in certain circumstances, of his

counterpart of the other century

—

sees him ; this is the " liability

he has to face." Now, years before, in The Turn of the Screw, Jameshad used the same word " liability "—" liability to impressions "

—

in a very similar way ; he had written of the governess's " liability"

to glimpses of the apparitions. That is why, when he utters the

word again in these communings, he seems to catch the idea he is

seeking by the " tip of the tail."2 "I'm glad you like adverbs—I adore them ; they are the only

qualifications I really much respect, and I agree with the fine authorof your quotations in saying—or in thinking—that the sense for

them is the literary sense."

—

Letters, ed. P. Lubbock, vol. ii., p. 222.

19


overlooked—and a few bad moments will follow.

Generally the alarm will prove needless and he will

see—

" on recovery ofmy wits, not to say ofmy wit"

—that everything is right : "I gasp with relief. . . .

Just now, a page or two back, I lost my presence of

mind, I let myself be badly scared." When he' sees " sufficiently he will not pause to elaborate,

but will merely leave a reminder by the way—plant

a stick, as it were, to mark the spot ; but sometimes

(this happened with The Sense of the Past) an inter-

ruption would come in the work and he would find

that his " notation " had been insufficient. Thenwould follow some searching round for the original

idea ; after a little patience as a rule it would begin

to return to him :" when I try to recover what I

so long ago had in my head about this, there glim-

mers out, there floats shyly back to me from afar

. . ." It is interesting, too, to accompany him in

his balancing of the pros and cons of minutiae—ages,

appearances, chronologies—and his worries about

names. He does not wish to waste " Cantopher,"

we learn, but for a while has trouble in fitting it to

an appropriate person ; and until he has arranged

these matters to his satisfaction one character has

perforce to figure as " Aurora What's-her-name "

and another as " Mrs. So and So of Drydown,"while a third is the " Horace Walpole man." There

are also the backgrounds to be thought out—but

they rarely seem to need much consideration : the

sense of them comes naturally to him as the story

proceeds. So, of an episode in The Sense of the Past

he says : "I seem to see this altogether in latish

20

HENRY JAMES

daylight of a spring, say of a March or April,

season."

The impression everywhere is of his deep joy in

his craft ; the difficulties themselves are part of the

joy, for he has only to press more firmly, though

gently and intelligently, and all will be well. Aboveall, he is never satisfied until the pressure has been

complete, until his theme, whatever it is, has been

fully rendered. There is a title of one of James's

stories that might well symbolise his constant purpose

in them all : it is The Turn of the Screw. " Theexhibitional further twist "

: nothing contents himuntil he believes he has attained that, squeezed the

best interest from his material, extracted the utmost

—which is for him the refined, the deep, the ultimate

meaning—from whatever he has in hand. If wecompare what we have of his novel The Sense of the

Past with the play Berkeley Square, adapted from it

by J. L. Balderston and J. C. Squire, we shall see at

a dozen points precisely what he meant by the" exhibitional further twist " ; and in these pre-

liminary notes we may watch the " screw " itself

turning, as he tries for "a finer twist still, a deeper

depth or higher flight of the situation." He hadnot the special talent required for the writing of

Berkeley Square—a good play, which has deserved its

popularity ; on the other hand, he would scarcely

have wished to write it : it would have seemed to

him that the screw there had hardly begun to turn.

The method of the last novels is not to be summedup in a phrase : the prefaces exist to prove that !

Yet one may say that its main principle is the con-

21


sistent employment of the consciousness as the

medium of exposition. The change from the earlier

novels is perhaps one of degree after all, but the

degree is very great. The use of the consciousness

is now rigorous and deliberate as it was not in anyof the earlier work. There may be one consciousness

framing the whole narrative, as in The Ambassadors ;

or, as in the other two books of the final group,

several minds in turn and in interplay will hold the

story ; the point is that everything that now happens

—or everything that really matters—is shown as

mirrored in some mind. The minds are " burnished

reflectors " and the beams they cast make the novel.

The result (as has been pointed out) is really a

special, an enlarged kind of dramatisation. Nothing

is " told "—beyond unimportant details of place,

time, situation and the like : we must gather for

ourselves from the recorded thinkings of the

characters (as in a stage drama from their speeches,

looks and movements) what happens. The author's" narration " is now at a minimum : instead of

narrating, he shows. It is true that James never

attempted (as Joyce was later to attempt) to transfer

fully to paper the moments in the brain of this or

that character, as these moments might have been

in actual life ; we are in contact all the time with

some mind or other, but never with a whole mindin all its complex activity. James's purpose was

different : from the whole stream of the conscious-

ness he isolates the current he requires ; from

the selected thinkings of his people he makes his

novel.

22

HENRY JAMES

In The Ambassadors only the one register is used,

but the method is infinitely flexible and as a rule

appropriate " reflectors " are chosen for different

blocks of story ; and even within these blocks there

may be—and generally are—continual slight shifts

in the point of view. The closeness, too, with which

the movements of any particular mind are recorded

varies continually, so that we may be at one momentmuch more fully within it than at another : all such

fluctuations are studied. But the principle of the

method remains : registers there must be. So, at

one point of the notes for The Sense of the Past Jamesexclaims :

" I, of course, under penalty of the last

infamy, stick here still, as everywhere, to our

knowing these things but through Ralph's knowingthem." So, in the preface to The Wings of the Dove

he speaks of Kate Croy as being, for a period in the

story, " turned on " like a lamp : her mind, for a

space, becomes the burnished reflector, or (he

varies the image) for a time we are to " breathe

through her lungs." Then Densher's mind takes upthe recording. The Dove herself, though at the

centre of all, is used differently, being " watchedthrough the successive windows of other people's

interest in her." But always, somewhere, is the" delegated sensibility " : for what James nowwished to express

—" the finer vibrations of experi-

ence "—it seemed the only method.

Its exactions are evident, and there were, besides,

other obvious barriers to the general acceptance of

these later books. The material itself was of the

narrowest appeal : " blood and dust and heat, he

23


ruled them out," so Mr. Wells complains ; onemust agree that he did ; and there is truth in the

remark of another critic that " curiosity is the one

passion celebrated with any cordiality by Mr.

James." It is a passion that may even assume, at

times, an aspect of pitilessness ; there are stories in

which that merciless aesthetic preoccupation which

his characters borrow from himself seems too cold-

blooded, in which their joy of curiosity, their gift of

scrutiny, becomes almost appalling. Then again,

his technique, as we know, was all in all to him :

" the refreshment of calculation and construction ":

how many phrases there are of that kind ! Hespeaks in one place of the management of time in

the novel, of its being the job of " most difficulty

and therefore of most dignity ": the " therefore

"

is very significant. The result sometimes—only

sometimes—of such an absorption is that the work

suggests excogitation, as if it were an immensetechnical exercise. This does not often happen, but

there are moments when one has the sense of a

controlling diagram into winch people and their

fortunes are fitted and for the purpose of which they

exist. The effect, once again, is occasionally of a

faint inhumanity. There are other deterrents, of

which the slow time is one. The later novels moveforward insensibly, with a quality almost sidereal

in their motion ; certain hardly visible displace-

ments occur ; the change seems slight yet—as in a

regrouped constellation—can have enormous im-

plications. Or we may imagine a loom furiously

working to weave a great pattern which appears by

24

HENRY JAMES

imperceptible degrees : to watch it as inch by inch

it comes needs patience.

And what happens in a late James novel ? In the

ordinary sense of the word, very little. "It is an

incident," he declared, " for a woman to stand upwith her hand resting on the table and look at you

in a certain way.'5

These, indeed—with what they

imply—are the events, almost exclusively the events,

of the latest novels : a sudden gesture, a turn of the

eyes at a certain moment, a failure to ask a question,

a sight of two people standing at a stair-head. In

The Golden Bowl, for an example, four people are of

the first importance ; a middle-aged American, his

daughter, the Italian prince who becomes this

daughter's husband, the lady who becomes the

father's second wife : this lady and the prince, weare to understand, had been previously lovers.

The story of the novel is the story of a gradual

regrouping of these four people, or of the slow

spiritual victory of two of them over the other two.

At no moment is any one of the characters aware of

all that is happening—there are circlings in anobscurity, stealthy moral enmeshments—and each

of the persons concerned is alone in his or her sur-

mises, guessing dimly at what the others purpose

and know. We can hardly call it real, for it is

existence too rarified to be real, it is life infinitely

—

if one will, unnaturally—intensified in a certain

direction. James knew very well, of course, what he

was about, and would have been the first to admitthat the great primary human affections were not

crudely conspicuous in a novel such as this. He was

25


not very eager to have them so ; but he would still

have felt that it was not quite fair, after he had ruled

out the " blood and dust and heat," to call what he

had kept a " residuum " : for him at least this

residuum—of the " finer vibrations of experience"

—was precisely the value of values, the ultimate" worth-while " of life.

And surely the method itself, with all its rigours,

was worth while. The demands need not be

minimised—how, for a last example, the dialogue

makes one strain ! In the final books it is at its

subtlest, bewildering us at times as if we were in

some game of blind-man's-buff—or in a labyrinth

of ambiguities where we must breathe hard to follow.

It is the most exacting of allJames's devices and there

are moments when we cry out in despair. Yet weare compelled to wonder, could the " finer vibra-

tions " have been caught by any instrument less

delicate ?

Then there is that other instrument which he

perfected in the later years and upon which he camemore and more to rely—image. The later style is

woven of metaphor, a shining tissue, and here at

least no labours are required of us : we need only

wonder and enjoy. Complex as much of the

imagery is, it is with no sense of effort that it seems

to come : a profusion is at hand, and we never feel

that it is for decoration. James now thinks in figure.

It is very interesting, as one reads through those

memoranda for The Sense of the Past, to notice howcontinually it is a question, not of " working out,"" constructing " or " inventing," but of " seeing "

:

26

HENRY JAMES

again and again that word is used. And so it is with

The Golden Bowl. Towards the end of that book the

impalpable toils begin to close round the injuring

woman ; the metaphors by which her situation is

expressed vary endlessly, but James especially sees

her as a prisoner : his mind comes back constantly

to the vision of some " cage " in which Charlotte

bruises herself in vain, from which she continually

strives to escape." Maggie's sense (was) open as to the sight of gilt

wires and bruised wings, the spacious but suspended

cage, the home of eternal unrest, ofpacings, beatings,

shakings all so vain, into which the baffled conscious-

ness helplessly resolved itself. The cage was the

deluded condition, and Maggie, as having knowndelusion—rather ! understood the nature of cages.

She walked round Charlotte's—cautiously and in a

very wide circle ; and when inevitably they had to

communicate she felt herself comparatively outside

and on the breast of nature : she saw her com-panion's face as that of a prisoner looking through

bars. So it was that through bars, bars richly gilt

but firmly though discreetly planted, Charlotte struck

her as making a grim attempt ; from which at first

the Princess drew back as instinctively as if the door

of the cage had suddenly been opened from within."

Charlotte presently makes the attempt :

" The splendid shining supple creature was out of

the cage, was at large ; and the question nowalmost grotesquely rose of whether she mightn't bysome art, just where she was and before she could gofurther, be hemmed in and secured."

j.jo. 2- c


She is secured, by Verver, her husband ; andonce again it is Maggie's impression that we receive,

the mirror of her mind that reflects to us the situa-

tion. Her father and stepmother are walking

together in the gallery at Fawns, inspecting the

precious objects in their cases :

" Charlotte hung behind with emphasised atten-

tion ; she stopped when her husband stopped, but

at the distance of a case or two, or of whatever other

succession of objects ; and the likeness of their con-

nection wouldn't have been wrongly figured if he

had been thought of as holding in one of his pocketed

hands the end of a long silken halter looped round

her beautiful neck. He didn't twitch it, yet it was

there ; he didn't drag her, but she came ; and those

betrayals that I have described the Princess as

finding irresistible in him were two or three mutefacial intimations which his wife's presence didn't

prevent his addressing his daughter—nor prevent

his daughter, as she passed, it was doubtless to be

added, from flushing a little at the receipt of. Theyamounted perhaps only to a wordless, wordless

smile, but the smile was the soft shake of the twisted

silken rope, and Maggie's translation of it, held in

her breast till she got well away, came out only, as

if it might have been overheard, when some door

was closed behind her. ' Yes, you see—I lead her

now by the neck, I lead her to her doom, and she

doesn't so much as know what it is, though she has a

fear in her heart which, if you had the chances to

apply your ear there that I, as a husband, have, you

would hear thump and thump and thump.'"

28

HENRY JAMES

Conrad remarked that " one is never set at rest byMr. James's novels," for they " end as an episode in

life ends," that is, not very conclusively. It is true,

at least of the later ones. The end is often a discord,

faint or prolonged, and the definiteness even of a

sharp tragic solution is lacking. But such endings,

enigmatic or incomplete, can be very beautiful ;

and none is more admirable in this way than that

of The Golden Bowl, As cool twilight falls on the

room in which the last scene takes place, so the close

of the book itself is like a soft sinking to dusk : andin the mind, too, some shadows remain.

29

JAMES JOYCE

Perhaps the readiest way of bringing the work of

James Joyce into perspective, so that we may see at

the outset where he stands in relation to his pre-

decessors, is to distinguish three stages in the

changing method of the English novel. Such a

view will possess, needless to say, a merely diagram-

matic value, for it must simplify drastically a long

and intricate development, but it may serve to

suggest at least a part of what has happened, and it

helps, in a moment, to " place " Joyce.

Let us cast our minds back to the beginnings of

the English novel, and particularly to Fielding.

How does Fielding write a novel ? He writes it, to

put the matter in a phrase, by telling us in person.

Open Tom Jones at random, and unless you light

upon a conversation—and no novelist in Englandhas managed conversations more dextrously than

Fielding—you are almost sure to come upon a

passage like this :" Some of my readers may be

inclined to think this event unnatural. [He is

alluding to Tom's infidelity with Molly Seagrim.]

However, the fact is true, and perhaps may be

sufficiently accounted for by suggesting ..." andso on. Fielding accounts for it very well ; he makes

us understand, by his wise commentary, hownatural the event was. But the interest is in the

30

JAMES JOYCE

method. The author in person narrates ; he gives

his authority for this and that :" The fact is true,"

he says. He knows what occurred, and he tells the

story as if it were indeed a history and he the

historian, in difficult places offering suggestions—as

one better informed than we are, though not quite

omniscient—concerning the motives of his people.

Here is one way of writing a novel, and when the

author is a Fielding we know what an excellent wayit can be. We feel his delightful presence every-

where : he explains, he comments, he underlines,

he warns, he jokes. The method is too good to pass

into disuse. Every now and again, to-day, a really

important novel of the Fielding type will appear.

Nevertheless, there have been changes. FromFielding, let us take a long leap and, passing by for

the present the great mid-Victorian writers, cometo the later years of the nineteenth century. Nonovelist of this period was more interested in his

craft than Henry James, and in the method he

evolved there was no place for what had been

Fielding's main procedure. I have just spoken of

Fielding as " giving his authority " for this andthat. The word Henry James likes to use is

" guarantee," and his first principle of composition

is that nothing—or nothing that matters—must be

given on the author's guarantee. To " tell " the

reader is, he would say, to abandon the whole task

of writing a novel. Instead of telling, Henry Jamesshows, and he shows by putting us in contact with

the minds of his people. When we are in contact

with their minds we are in a position to judge for

31


ourselves : the author's explanations are unnecessary.

Indeed, to keep himself, as author, in the back-

ground is forJames a cardinal rule. He " narrates,"

in the ordinary sense of the word, very little ;

almost all that happens (in a novel of his later

period) is mirrored in the consciousness of one or

other of the characters ; their minds become" burnished reflectors "

; sometimes the mind of

one character will reflect the whole story.

Here, plainly, we have come a long way, in

method, from Fielding. What is the next stage ?

The technique of Henry James is " advanced " even

for to-day, for few novelists of the present time carry

his methods quite as far as he did himself. Yet a

further development is possible.

Henry James, to repeat, places us in contact with

the minds of his persons : but the word " contact"

is not precise. It would be difficult to find even

half a page in Henry James where the recorded

thoughts of this or that character could have con-

stituted an actual piece of his or her thinking as it

might have been in real life. No moment, that is,

in the brain of this or that character is transferred

fully to paper ; rather, the thoughts are edited,

selected, interpreted for us, very much as they are,

say, in a Browning monologue. And just as in a

Browning monologue, no matter who is speaking,

the language is that of Browning, so in a HenryJames novel, no matter who is thinking, the expres-

sion is in the personal style—the very definitely

personal style—of Henry James. In other words,

although in a late novel by Henry James we are

32

JAMES JOYCE

always in contact with some mind or other, it is

never with a whole mind in all its complex activity ;

the author, although he is now so little in evidence

is still mediating ; he is still, if not patently, insidi-

ously, between us and his people.

Can we come closer still to the minds of people

in a novel ? And, instead of being given an adapta-

tion of their thinkings, is an immediate, an exact

rendering possible ? Perhaps few suspected, until

Joyce wrote, how close we could get, and howprecise the rendering could be. We reach the third

stage in our summary scheme of technical develop-

ment with the Ulysses ofJames Joyce.

Let me recall the drift of this remarkable work.

The whole action (presented in seven hundred andthirty or so very large pages) occupies approximately

nineteen hours of time. It begins—the scene fromfirst to last being in or near Dublin—at about eight

o'clock in the morning ofJune 16th, 1904, and ends

in the early hours, say between three and four, of

the next day. Superficially, very little happens.

This is one of the first surprises of Ulysses for the

novel-reader, and was one of the first of the affronts

it offered to the orthodox novel-writer. ArnoldBennett accused Joyce at once of having taken" malicious pleasure in picking up the first commonday that came to hand," adding that he would, nodoubt, if he had thought of it, have selected a dayon which his hero was confined to his bed by a

passing indisposition.

And, at first sight, there seems a good deal to besaid for Bennett's objection. What does happen,

33


after all ? The main character is Leopold Bloom,

a canvasser for newspaper advertisements. He rises

at eight o'clock, goes out to buy a kidney, comesback, takes his wife her breakfast while the kidney

is cooking for his own, prepares himself for the day(he has put on black because he must attend the

funeral of a friend), leaves the house. He walks

along the Dublin streets rather lazily meditating ;

he takes a Turkish bath (it is not even one of his

busy days) ; he attends the funeral and talks with

friends ; he visits a newspaper office, has a little

lunch, rests at the Ormond Hotel, strolls to the

beach for a breath offresh air, and, after some further

wanderings and encounters, returns to his home andgoes to bed. A somewhat commonplace day in the

life of the rather commonplace character, Leopold

Bloom, rendered with an amplitude of detail

unprecedented in literary history : it is easy to

understand Bennett's protest.

Yet, he is not quite fair, nor has the rough sketch

just given of the scope of the book been quite fair.

At least two events of great importance were left

out. One of them—Mrs. Bloom's appointment with

Blazes Boylan—makes this sixteenth of June a dayof considerable mental torture for Bloom ; not for

long during the eighteen hours or so in which wefollow him is this trouble far from his thoughts.

The other event—in the design of the book the most

important of all—is the meeting of Bloom andStephen Dedalus. It is' a meeting that profoundly

affects both lives, for each man is enabled by it to

find himself: Bloom, because he can, in a sense,

34

JAMES JOYCE

regain in Stephen the son whom he lost long ago;

Stephen, because (as a creative artist) he has

encountered in Bloom his predestined subject.

For both of these men, therefore, the day is really

important, and even if we were still to quarrel with

the work for the " lack of distinction " in its matter,

it would remain true that few books leave us with

the sensation of having been plunged so deeply into

life. This leads us to a consideration of its method,

for it is by his unusual technique that Joyce is able

to create such an impression.

I say " method," and it is true that Joyce holds

one objective before him. He is trying to find the

complete and accurate way of rendering his subject,

or of this or that part of it with which he is at the

moment dealing. But such a search means, in the

result, that his treatment varies from episode to

episode, though one device, modified in several

ways, is of quite outstanding importance.

The book begins, not at all startlingly, like anorthodox novel : the texture of the first few pages,

which introduce us to Stephen Dedalus, is quite

ordinary. But presently we become aware of a

change. What Stephen is doing, what he is saying,

begin almost at once to dwindle in importance ; weeven lose our grip a little of these matters ; andsomething else increasingly takes their place—whathe is thinking. There is no other word to use but

that, but it means now the kind of thinking that

actually does go on in our minds from moment to

moment, not the arranged thinking of a character in

Henry James. Thus, we hear him at his school,

35


giving lessons ; we hear the questions of the boys

and his replies ; but we overhear, as well, his

unspoken meditations, abrupt, unpredictable, manyof them bitter, inward-turning, for he has had a

troubled spiritual history and is now at odds with

his life. Stephen's mind is subtle, his nature proud,

fastidious and lonely, his temperament that of an

artist ; and his thoughts, as they come, make a very

intricate, sometimes a very beautiful, pattern.

Leopold Bloom's mind is simpler, but interesting

in its way. He is an Irish Jew, thirty-eight years of

age, and a man of a type not often found within the

pages of a novel. This is because, by ordinary

methods, he would be difficult to treat. His nature

is negative. Thus, he loves his wife, yet, knowingof her infidelities, makes no move to interfere : it is

rather humility than cowardice that restrains him.

Again, he is a friendless man ; he is quiet andunassuming, yet his Dublin acquaintances do not

much care for him, though they are forced to respect

certain of his qualities. He has a real kindliness of

disposition ; as he helps the blind piano-tuner across

the road he gropes for a word or two that will be

sympathetic and yet tactful :" Say something to

him. Better not do the condescending . . . Poor

fellow, quite a boy." His brain, too, is good,

scientifically bent and reasonably well-stocked with

information. Yet we ourselves, who come to knowhim far better than his closest associates could have

done, hardly reach the point of liking him, though

we do not actively dislike him ; and perhaps the

reason for the feeling we have towards him is that

36

JAMES JOYCE

he impresses uc in some vague general way, as well

as in certain precise and definite ways, as ignoble.

But I suppose that few commentators find it easy

to sum up Leopold Bloom, and the difficulty is not

fully accounted for by the indefinite character of the

man. It is explained also, paradoxically, by this,

that we know so very much about him. In fiction,

the sharply remembered people are very often the

people of whose natures we are shown only a small

part, the people whose characters are drastically

selected for us ; and of course it is easy to under-

stand why it should be so. What fictitious personage

lives in our mind more vividly than Mr. Micawber ?

How easy to sum up Mr. Micawber ! We know so

little about him, but we know that little so well. It

is not so easy to sum up Hamlet, or rather everybody

sums him up differently ; and it is partly because

our knowledge of him is so various and full. But

let us go a stage farther. How would one proceed

to sum up one's own character ? This is quite a

different thing from having it summed up for one ;

most ofus can easily guess how such characterisations

go, and are prepared (a little ruefully, it may be) to

admit that they represent fairly accurately the

simplified truth of the matter. Only, we ourselves

have so much more information that we do not find

it so easy to simplify ; we are in possession of too

much material, really, for a clear and satisfactory

picture of ourselves.

It is like that with our knowledge of LeopoldBloom in Ulysses. It has been said that " we knowmore about him than we know about any other

37


character in fiction," and it would be difficult to

deny the justice of this claim. We know practically

everything he thinks about for eighteen hours, andthat means that we know virtually all there is to

know of him.

The stupendousness of this really needs to be dwelt

upon. Leaving aside for the moment the question

whether Bloom's thoughts are worth having, or

whether, as Bennett considered, the net result of all

this material is a " pervading difficult dullness," the

achievement in itself—as a creative feat—takes one's

breath away. The method—not invented by Joyce,

but never employed before on such a scale—is that

of the " interior " or mental monologue. Joyce uses

a notation, in Bloom's case rather abrupt, staccato,

to suggest the thoughts of the man just as they come,

twisting this way and that as sights catch his eye,

rouse memories, provoke associations ; we follow

instant by instant the crazy trail of the man's mind.

Now, we are all, of course, familiar with these

processes ; we know how our own thoughts skip

and jump here and there, and can travel in a few

bounds from one end of the world to the other.

Bloom's mind does the same. He is walking, for

example, by the riverside, when someone puts an

evangelical leaflet into his hand ; it is because of

this incident that a few seconds afterwards he is

thinking of Malaga raisins. The train of thought

is as follows : the leaflet reminds him of Torry and

Alexander ;" paying game," he meditates ; some

Birmingham firm, he remembers, rigged up a

luminous crucifix once, used phosphorus, probably.

38

JAMES JOYCE

The idea of phosphorus starts another recollection,

reminding him of a time he saw phosphorescence in

a fish, " bluey-silver " it was. He had gone down to

the pantry and saw the codfish gleaming in the dark ;

his wife had asked him to bring her up some Malagaraisins.

A little later he notices sea-gulls wheeling and buys

two Banbury cakes to feed them ; the gulls lead his

mind by devious routes to Robinson Crusoe—

a

quotation will show the style. He " broke the brittle

paste and threw its fragments down into the Liffey.

See that ? The gulls swooped silently, two, then all,

from their heights, pouncing on prey. Gone.

Every morsel." Aware of their greed and cunning he shook the

powdery crumb from his hands. They never

expected that. Manna. Live on fishy flesh they

have to, all sea birds, gulls, seagoose. Swans from

Anna Liffey swim down here sometimes to preen

themselves. No accounting for tastes. Wonderwhat kind is swan meat. Robinson Crusoe had to

live on them."

So his thoughts flow, not always lazily like this.

Every now and again emotion, or rememberedemotion, will quicken them, and the sight of Boylan,

whose path crosses his several times during the day,

always brings a sudden swirl and tumult into them,

a momentary panic.

It strikes one at first as perhaps not very difficult,

this recording of trains of thought, and neither, in

itself, is it. We can each of us do it any minute bymerely taking up a pencil. But try to do it for

39


someone else, for an imaginary person, and then,

page after page, keep the pattern coherent, recording,

not any train, but the one particular train that is

right for this, out of all other personalities, in these

and no other circumstances. For grasp of character,

at least, no test can be conceived more severe.

As far as one can judge, there is no breakdown in

the record given by Joyce of Leopold Bloom. Thatis another way of saying that Bloom's mind, after a

time, acquires for us an identity ; after a little

experience we begin to recognise his way of thinking.

It is utterly different from the way of Stephen

Dedalus, or of his wife, or of anyone else, and the

sensation of being quite within a mind in this

fashion—not partially, but completely within—is

very curious. Indeed, the effect at a first reading

of Ulysses is not a little bewildering. It is bewildering,

in the first place, because the mind exists for us, for

a while, apart from a body, for it is not until sometime has elapsed that we begin to learn, frominformation picked up here and there, what Bloomlooks like ; and the sensation of sharing the thoughts

of a man whom one cannot picture to oneself is very

curious. Then, it takes time to gain one's bearings

in the outside world, and this, too, if one thinks of

it, is easily understood. When we walk along a

familiar street, or enter a room we know well, we donot notice very particularly objects we have seen

hundreds of times before. If someone else could be

in my mind as I entered my study, that person would

gain a very poor idea indeed ofwhat my study looked

like, simply because my mind would not be very

40

JAMES JOYCE

consciously occupied with it. So, Bloom's minddoes not reflect to us a very good picture at all of his

kitchen as he prepares his breakfast ; he moves

about, performing certain actions, but the sur-

roundings are rather hazy to us. It is the same with

the Dublin streets. This or that object, as he goes

along, enters his thoughts, but we cannot expect

him to introduce us to the street in which he is

walking, as a novelist might. Joyce himself helps

now and then with " stage-directions,55 but it is part

of his plan to keep his intrusions, as author, as

infrequent as may be. Still, we find that the Dublin

scene, after a while, has invaded our consciousness.

We rarely see it, because Bloom himself only at

moments looks at it with full awareness ; for most

of the time it is a background to his thoughts.; but

it is a very real background, and so it comes to be

for us.

Occasionally, however, the scene will becomemuch more vivid ; we see, suddenly, very muchmore ; and this is generally because we are shifted

to a place where the characters whose minds wepossess grow, for some reason, more conscious of

their surroundings. The episode at the beach

(Nausikaa) illustrates this very well. Here sights

and sounds are noticed more, for the people have

come down in the evening for pastime and relaxa-

tion, and yield themselves in this interval of leisure

to enjoyment of the hour and the place.

But this episode, besides, is extremely interesting

for its method. During its course we are for half the

time, but only half, in the mind of Leopold Bloom.

41


For the other half we are amongst the thoughts of

Gerty MacDowell, who has come with two girl

friends to have a " cosy chat beside the sparkling

waves and discuss matters feminine." Gerty Mac-Dowell has a romantic mind which has been

nourished on cheap fiction, and the surroundings

soon affect her mood. She begins to notice Bloom(sitting not far off), to speculate about him, andpresently to construct a sentimental story, involving

the two of them, in the manner of the novelettes of

which she is so fond. The vocabulary of her mono-logue is drawn from at least two distinct sources.

There is first her own personal " chit-chat " style,

her every-day girlish dialect with its homely proverbs,

its stock phrases and the like : the very it, split your

sides, every inch a gentleman, something off the

common, little love of a hat, a deliberate lie, their

little tiffs, honour where honour is due. But her

mind, also, is crammed with expressions from the

novels she reads, and in her present wistful, dreamymood they afford her a natural means of utterance :

winsome Irish girlhood, waxen pallor, rosebud

mouth, a gentlewoman of high degree, eyes of

witchery, haunting expression, crowning glory,

wealth of wonderful hair.

So, as she sits there by the waters of the bay she

creates for herself the part of a sad heroine of

romance :" Had kind fate but willed her to be

born a gentlewoman of high degree in her ownright and had she only received the benefit of a good

education Gerty MacDowell might easily have held

her own beside any lady in the land." Then her

42

JAMES JOYCE

thoughts—and in this passage the mingling of styles

is very evident—include the strange gentleman

sitting a few yards away :" She could see at once

by his dark eyes and his pale intellectual face that

he was a foreigner the image of the photo she hadof Martin Harvey, the matinee idol, only for the

moustache which she preferred because she wasn't

stage-struck like Winny Rippingham that wantedthey two to always dress the same on account of a

play but she could not see whether he had anaquiline nose or slightly retroussS from where she wassitting. He was in deep mourning, she could see

that, and the story of a haunting sorrow was written

on his face. She would have given worlds to knowwhat it was."

In the Gerty MacDowell monologue Joyce's gift

of mimicry is triumphantly employed. Thenovelettes that she reads have helped to form Gerty's

mind; her imagination has been fed upon them so

that they have now become a part of her ; and byimitating their manner and mixing it with her native

untutored idiom Joyce is able to convey, with a

completeness perhaps not possible otherwise, the

very texture of her thinking. The device is truly

expressive here.

But it is always prudent to be a little on one's

guard against Joyce when he is writing parodies.

He has such skill in them, and obviously enjoys the

exercise so much, that one suspects he might onoccasion be tempted into indulging his gift even

were it not strictly in place. It is clear that at least

once in Ulysses he has been so tempted.

MO.43


During the course of his day Bloom visits a

maternity hospital ; he calls to obtain news of Mrs.

Purefoy and is invited by the young house surgeon,

Dixon, to a room where medical students and others

are gathered for talk and refreshment. The episode

is rendered in a series of parodies of the prose styles

of English literature. The chapter is very enjoyable

and, as a feat of virtuosity, would perhaps be difficult

to equal. We have reminiscences of alliterative OldEnglish

—" Before born babe bliss had. Within

womb won he worship "—then, paragraph by para-

graph, are led through the phases of English prose

as it evolves, listening to the voices of Malory,

Milton, Browne, Bunyan, Pepys, Swift, up to Ruskin

and Pater and beyond, as in turn they take up the

story. The whole episode is a treasury of its kind.

The voices " come through " amazingly, so that wehave starts of delighted recognition as this one or

that one begins. When it is time for the birth of the

babe to be announced and for the father to be

congratulated, a voice, louder than any we have

heard before, suddenly clangs out ; the first syllables

are familiar ; we listen, and in an instant have

recognised it : the unmistakable ringing tones of

Carlyle are pronouncing a benediction :" God's

air, the Allfather's air, scintillant, circumambient,

cessile air. Breathe it deep into thee ! By heaven,

Theodore Purefoy, thou hast done a doughty deed

But what is the purport in the book of this series

of clever imitations ? Do the parodies really serve

a purpose ? It cannot for a moment be maintained

44

JAMES JOYCE

that they do. The history ofthe evolution of English

prose in a far-fetched way matches the development

of the human embryo, but it is obvious that such a

correspondence has no real point. The truth is that

Joyce's delight in a certain technical exercise has

here only the frailest pretext to justify it.

There is a second episode in the book against

which, perhaps, much the same sort of criticism

applies. It is near the end. Bloom, after a tiring

day—a day that, for all its humdrum air, has

brought him a good deal of fatiguing emotional

experience—has ended by following Stephen Dedalus

to the quarter of the city known as Nighttown, and,

after some time spent in the place, has emerged with

his friend into the open. They walk slowly towards

the cabman's shelter near Butt Bridge. Reaction

is on them both. It is a time ofthe night, or morning

—the small hours—when vitality is low ;physically

and mentally they are worn out. The passage is a

long one and is given in a prose as full of weariness

and flaccidity as the theme. " Preparatory to any-

thing else Mr. Bloom brushed off the greater bulk

of the shavings and handed Stephen the hat andash plant and bucked him up generally in orthodox

Samaritan fashion, which he very badly needed."

So this formless worn-out prose continues. WhatJoyce does is to imitate the kind of English in which

every phrase is stereotyped—the kind of English

that O. Henry satirised in his story Calloway's Code.

Like the reporter in that story we can guess the

second of any pair of words from the first : highly

advisable, confidently anticipated, time-honoured

AC D 2


adage, blissfully unconscious, cordially disliked,

vexed question. Now and again we are given analternative and might be wrong in our guess. Thusthe " highly " just quoted went with " advisable "

;

a little later it goes with " providential." But duties

always devolve, footsteps always lag, and if circum-

stances are unfavourable one always finds oneself" handicapped " by them.

Joyce's workmanship is, no doubt, as deft here as

anywhere in Ulysses and the episode is full ofhumour,but such a treatment surely has its perils. To present

weariness in a way that may itself so soon becomewearisome ; to express dullness dully ; in practice,

at any rate, the method might quickly prove

unworkable.

Such examples, however, prove Joyce a writer of

manifold inventiveness and of the richest technical

resource : a writer, also, who takes a' good deal of

pleasure in ingenuity for its own sake. Apart from

the " heroically laboured " Odyssean parallel, there

are many indications of such pleasure in his owncomments upon his work and in certain explanations

he has given. And perhaps, too, his very mastery

ofwords leads him at times to attempt what is nearly,

by the nature of the case, impossible.

Let me give an example of a kind rather different

from the passages we have so far considered. Joyce

is said to have taken keen enjoyment in composing

the episode of The Sirens ; his enjoyment, if only

because of his own passion for music, was natural,

for this is the musical episode. The scene is the bar

of the Ormond Hotel ; the sirens themselves are

46

JAMES JOYCE

the two maids, Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy.

Bloom enters the hotel at about four o'clock in the

afternoon ; we are in his consciousness occasionally

during the episode, not continually. We receive

impressions of the talk, the lights, the glitter, andcertain events of importance for Bloom take place.

But what is most interesting is the method by which

Joyce renders the scene. He tries to convey it all

—

the feeling of the time and place, the tiredness grow-

ing on Bloom so that his senses are becoming a little

blurred, the warmth, the fading afternoon, the

sounds entering from outside : some of them, like

the jingling of Blazes Boylan's jaunting-car, very

significant—by making a musical pattern of words.

The episode is intricately composed, with themes

that recur and alter, the themes here being key-

phrases. Most of them are announced to us before

the episode begins, for at the head of the chapter

we come upon a series of disconnected and frag-

mentary sentences, in themselves quite insoluble :

Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing . . .

Blew. Blue bloom is on the

Gold pinnacled hair . . .

Lost. Throstle fluted. All is lost now . . .

The text which follows makes these broken words

plain. They are almost exactly equivalent (a pretty

example, which has been noted, of Joyce's love of

an ingenious completeness) to the sounds whichfloat out from an orchestra before the real playing

begins : disjointed excerpts from the piece whichis to come, a bar here, a bar there, as this or that

47


instrument is tried. And just as at a concert these

preliminary snatches grow presently into coherence,

so in The Sirens the opening sentence of the chapter

clarifies for us the first of the fragments we have just

read :" Bronze by gold, Miss Douce's head by Miss

Kennedy's head, over the crossblind of the Ormondbar heard the viceregal hoofs go by, ringing steel."

The evocative quality in the language is evident,

and all through this passage one notes the unusual

resonance that words seem to acquire. It is partly

because sound is dominant in the subject-matter : a

tuning-fork yields its throbbing call, Simon Dedalus

sings (" Tenderness it welled : slow, swelling . . . "),

Miss Douce trills to herself, coins ring on the counter,

bottles are " popcorked," the cash register clangs,

hoof-beats echo sharply, the car of Boylan jingles

jauntily over the bridge. One does not, I think,

after reading this episode, have a very clear picture

of anything ; the scene is rather a coloured blur :

there are flashes from mirrors, glints from glasses,

reflections from gold and bronze hair, but all in a

haze, indistinct. Our ears, however, are receiving

the sharpest impressions all the time. The care

that has gone into the passage is very striking, and,

as usual, Joyce has not been able to refrain from

inserting a gratuitous parody or two, in harmonywith the general idea : he burlesques, here andthere, the rhythms of light popular music. But, in

the more serious parts, the method is sustained from

start to finish. The full ingenuity of the performance

is not, perhaps, to be appreciated without expert

musical knowledge, but some of the sound-effects

48

JAMES JOYCE

arc impressive even to the amateur. The bronze-

gold motif is especially interesting, re-appearing in

these forms :

Yes, bronze from anear, by gold from afar, heardsteel from anear, hoofs ring from afar, and heardsteelhoofs ringhoof ringsteel.

Again (the maids burst into laughter, their broken

references to the joke appearing in the description) :

In a giggling peal young goldbronze voices blended,Douce with Kennedy your other eye. They threwyoung heads back, bronze gigglegold, to let freefly

their laughter, screaming, your other, . . .

And again their merriment described :

Shrill, with deep laughter, after bronze in gold, they

urged each other to peal after peal, ringing in

changes, bronzegold, goldbronze, shrilldeep, to

laughter after laughter.

It will be seen, then, with what varied approaches

Joyce comes to his problem, or his problems, for

every section sets him a new task and he exerts

himself to find the one fitting treatment. There are

devices which I have not space even to mention,

but two episodes remain which demand at least a

word, for they are amongst the most remarkable in

the book : even the sceptical Arnold Bennett was

moved by them to admiring astonishment. Theyare the Nighttown scene, or, to give it its Odyssean

name, the episode of Circe ; and the monologuewhich concludes the work, the unuttered meditation

49


of Marion Bloom, or, to give it its Odyssean name,the episode of Penelope.

The first is a dramatic phantasmagoria which has

reminded nearly everyone of the Walpurgisnacht in

Faust. Stephen and Bloom come together again in

the low haunts of Nighttown ; it is late, they have

both experienced much, suffered much, during the

day ; they are very tired. Their minds are ready

for fantasy. They have reached a point where the

line between external reality and the images con-

jured up by their own brains begins to waver. Theysee what is before their eyes (though they see it often

distorted), but they also see phantoms, the wraiths

of their own fears, hopes, secret desires, memories,

impressions of the past day. All these intangible

shapes, these figments of the overwrought brain,

become dramatis persona, for it is the principle of

hallucination that dominates the scene. Stephen's

own experiences reach their culmination with the

appearance of the image of his dead mother ; all

day he has been haunted by the memory of her, has

been tortured (in spite of his judgment) by a sense

of guilt in having refused her last request. Theterrible simulacrum " comes nearer, breathing uponhim softly her breath of wetted ashes." Stephen's

endurance gives way, his features " grow drawn and

grey and old," and presently with a wild gesture he

sweeps down the chandelier. The crash is like the

end of the world :" Time's livid final flame leaps

and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space,

shattered glass and toppling masonry." Stephen

rushes into the night, but Bloom finds him and, with

50

JAMES JOYCE

a father's care, pilots him to the cabman's shelter

and then to his own home : Telemachus andUlysses have found each other.

We come, after a while, to the last episode in the

book. Bloom climbs wearily into bed, falls asleep,

and we are left alone—with the mind of Mrs. Bloom.

We have seen how Joyce varies according to the

person his way of recording these thought-streams ;

the method he adopts for Marion Bloom is different

from any yet used. It is a heavy, turbid, relentless

flood, a great tide of thought that is almost equally

sensation, and her whole life seems in it. Images of

past, present and future mingle : her early days at

Gibraltar, her first meeting with Bloom, her late

dissatisfactions, her new loves, hopes, worries :

everything significant in her experience seethes upas her mind goes churning on. We may quarrel

with other sections of Ulysses, feel dubious here anddiscouraged there, but this last chapter is plainly a

masterpiece of its kind. It is also one of the least

difficult ; indeed, the only source of trouble at all,

and it is slight, is the complete absence of punctua-

tion. Marion Bloom's " non-stop monologue " (the

phrase is Mr. Budgen's) covers forty-two large pages,

and, apart from a few paragraph divisions (where

her thoughts themselves seem to pause for breath)

there is no pointing of any kind. Her mind is like

that : Bloom's mind darts hither and thither, but

Mrs. Bloom's mind endlessly unrolls. If we take

into account the paragraph divisions, then we could

describe her monologue (again with Mr. Budgen)

as consisting of " eight unpunctuated sentences of

5i


about five thousand words each." To read it is to

know Mrs. Bloom through and through and for

ever and ever. The book Ulysses is a world, and this

monologue is a world within a world. Joyce himself

has commented justly on his achievement here.

Marion Bloom's monologue, he says, " turns slowly,

evenly, though with variations, capriciously, but

surely like the huge earth ball itself round andround spinning "

; and so it does. I suppose notechnical device used in Ulysses is so secure as that of

the interior monologue ; it seems fitting that the bookshould close with so triumphant an example of the

method. No representation of a human mind could

well be more intimate, more thorough, than this.

Or could it ? Is it possible to penetrate deeper

still ? Is a fourth stage in our provisional scheme

even imaginable ? Only if the representation,

passing beneath the conscious life, should enter the

realm of dreams ; and Joyce is even now, it appears,

striving to effect this very passage. He is at present,

as we know, working ona" something " even harder

to classify than Ulysses ; only fragments have been

published ; the " Work " is " in Progress." But it

has to do, it would seem, not with a waking mind at

all, not with one man's day, but with one man's

night—with a sleep. The difficulties in this newwork—the word-play, the allusiveness, the " con-

densation," all the intricacies of the dream-language

—are far beyond those of Ulysses, and whether any-

body butJoyce himself will ever properly understand

it remains at the moment dubious. Happily we need

not for the present decide. We can wait and see.

52

THOMAS HARDY AND < THE DYNASTS

'

Hardy has a stray observation (it is recorded byMrs. Hardy in the Early Life) which expresses per-

fectly the guiding principle of his art. He wrote :

"As in looking at a carpet, by following one colour

a certain pattern is suggested, by following another

colour, another ; so in life the seer should watch

that pattern among general things which his idio-

syncrasy moves him to observe, and describe that

alone. This is, quite accurately, a going to Nature ;

yet the result is no mere photograph, but purely a

product of the writer's own mind." That is whatHardy had been doing in the series of novels that

ended in 1896 with Jude the Obscure—seven years

before the appearance of the first part of The

Dynasts : he had been working out " that pattern

among general things which his idiosyncrasy movedhim to observe." We know the colour in life that

caught his eye and determined the pattern. His

bent appeared very early. Even the idyllic Under

the Greenwood Tree—his inaugural piece, properly

speaking—ends with a touch of irony, the secret

that Fancy would " never tell." There is a faintly

ominous quality in this conclusion, as if the author

were hinting :" Here is a fresh and dainty little

ndvel ; but do not imagine that I believe that life

is really like this, or that I could not, easily, have

53


made a very different book out of my subject."

From now on the tone steadily deepens : one recalls

his own phrase, " a good look at the worst ": his

scrutiny, as the novels proceed, becomes ever moreunblinking.

It is very interesting to watch this gradual darken-

ing of tone in the six major novels he was now to

write (I leave out of account books in the lighter

style, such as The Trumpet-Major and Two on a

Tower, which, with all their charm, plainly do not

carry the full burden of what he had to say). Thefirst of the main line is Farfrom the Madding Crowd,

a pastoral, its essence, as the very names of the

chapters show—The Malthouse, The Sheep-Wash-

ing, Hiving the Bees—in its delectable representa-

tion of the routine of country life. Yet into the

golden scene tragedy intrudes ; humanity is shownsuffering ; Gabriel and Bathsheba themselves reach

their happiness through pain and trial and with

spirits notably subdued. In the next novel the

tragic significance is definitely central. Yet The

Return of the Native is still, in feeling, a long wayfrom Jude the Obscure, It is not a distressing tragedy,

and one main reason surely is that we have a sense

of justice in the development. Eustacia, besides

—

she of the " flame-like " soul—is not the kind of

heroine to be pitied. How she would resent that !

She is a splendid creature who has had her chance,

and who has been vanquished in fair fight with the

universe. She has been defeated, but she has lived

her life (" a blaze of love, and extinction ") with

defiance and with glory. In The Mayor of Caster-

54

THOMAS HARDY AND 'THE DYNASTS'

bridge the impression ofjustice is even stronger, and,

again, the chief character has real tragic power.

In this novel, more evidently than in its predecessor,

far more conspicuously than in any other novel of

Hardy's, fate is felt as within a personality. Hen-chard (the most forceful character of Hardy's

drawing) is self-destroyed ; but the conflict has

been on an impressive scale, and the end still leaves

us feeling the innate strength of the man. His

punishment, fearful as it is, is not greater than he

can bear. In both these novels humanity is repre-

sented as powerful, as being, in a way, a match for

destiny. But now this sense of power (and there-

fore of responsibility) in the human combatants

begins to diminish. The design of The Woodlanders,

the next book, has some resemblance to that of Far

from the Madding Crowd ; but what a difference in

the mood ! Here, almost from the first lines, wehave a premonition of sad fatality. Fortunes turn

awry, and we know, from something in the very air

of those damp and lonely woodlands, that they must.

For the woods themselves are like a symbol : it is

in their autumnal guise that we chiefly rememberthem and in their aspects of saddening decay. Norare there characters here of the rich vitality of

Eustacia, the crude vigour of Henchard. Poor

Winterborne—the genius of the scene, " Autumn'svery brother "—is ineffectual to cope with baffling

circumstance ; from the first, we felt that he wasmarked for mischance. But the change, in the next

novel, is still more definite, and it is a change, above

all, in the author's attitude. It sounds in the chal-

55


lenging title, Tess of the D^Urbervilles, "a Pure

Woman faithfully presented by Thomas Hardy.

"

The note that rings in this book—and we have heard

it in no previous novel of Hardy's—is that of anger :

indignation at the powers in control of human lives,

powers here felt as outside humanity and alien to

it. A passionate defensiveness unites the author

with this heroine ; he would protect her ; as it is,

he indicts savagely the Wrong of which she is victim.

As for the fairness, here, of the conflict—the idea is

laughable. There are passages in the book which

sound like taunts of the Beings who do such things,

or let such things happen, and there are jibes at

the poets of optimism ; like this :" To Tess, as to

not a few million of others, there was ghastly satire

in the poet's lines

—

not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come ";

or like this :" In the anguish of his heart he quoted

a line from a poet, with peculiar emendations of

his own :

God's not in His heaven ; all's wrong with the world."

The virtual motto of the novel—the lines are quoted

in the preface—is Gloster's outraged cry in King

Lear :

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods :

They kill us for their sport

;

and there are images that seem to underline the

text, like the picture of Tess " standing still uponthe hemmed expanse of verdant flatness, like a fly

56

THOMAS HARDY AND < THE DYNASTS'

on a billiard table, and of no more consequence to

the surroundings than that fly."

Yet we all know the beauty of this bitter novel.

Hardy often spoke of the transmuting quality of art

—its power to glorify pain, nay, ugliness itself. His

own art, too, had that magic. The loveliness of

Tess's nature, and the loveliness of the scenes—the

two vales, the one with its deep blue atmosphere,

the other with its ethereal mists of dawn—irradiate

the book.

In the last of the series this transfiguring beauty

is not so evident. Hardy could make his titles very

telling, and no story or poem was named morebitingly than this novel. It was called once,

satirically, The Simpletons ; again, with stirring

resonance, Hearts Insurgent ; its final grim name was

Jude the Obscure. Here, amidst the suffering and the

squalor, the last gleams of the exaltation of tragedy

are extinguished ; or perhaps not quite, even yet,

for mankind, though so pitifully pictured, is still

noble, and the glow of those two fruitlessly aspiring" hearts insurgent "—the divine enthusiasm of " the

simpletons "—is not quenched till life itself goes.

Still, the shadows cast by the frowning universe

have become black indeed ; face to face with this

monstrous indifference in things, man has no hope.

Hardy published Jude the Obscure (to the tune of

much protesting outcry) in 1896, and he wrote nomore novels, or none that matters. He had des-

cribed the pattern of human experience in the wayin which to his idiosyncrasy it presented itself. Buthe had still something to say, though not in prose

57


fiction. In a great poem, with its liberating sym-bolisms, he believed he could convey more of whatwas in his heart than any novel had ever given himfreedom to express. After Jude came two books of

verse ; then, in 1903, the first volume of The

Dynasts. In a late chapter of Jude, Hardy had des-

cribed the " vague and quaint imaginings " that in

earlier days had haunted Sue : the idea " that the

world resembled a stanza or melody composed in a

dream ; it was wonderfully excellent to the half-

aroused intelligence, but hopelessly absurd at the

full waking ; that the First Cause worked auto-

matically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively

like a sage." To this " Somnambulist First Cause "

Hardy's thoughts had been gathering for manyyears. Now he would proceed to the demonstra-

tion and trace the full pattern of life as it struck his

eyes.

In a sense the picture he was now to draw is moreterrible than any that had appeared in the novels,

even in the last. In Jude mankind, though obscure,

may still be represented by two puny figures, vainly

struggling. But in The Dynasts poor " pitpatting"

humanity has dwindled to an insignificance far

beyond that. No individual—not even Napoleon,

in spite of Hardy's first thoughts—has sufficient

import to be the hero of this work : nearly as well

single out an ant from the myriads of its kind. Onthe other hand, the bitterness of the two concluding

novels disappears. Hardy no longer rages, is nolonger resentful. With calm spirit, with compassion,

but with inexorable fidelity to his vision, he comes

58


to his mighty drama of the Breaking of Nations,

which is also his most explicit utterance of all that

he most deeply felt about the nature of things. The

Dynasts, in this way and others, is Hardy's central,

his crowning, work.

First, as to its form. Hardy did not reach a

decision about this quite at once. A note belonging

to 1875—f°r tne ambition had been long cherished

—is expressed like this : "A Ballad of the HundredDays. Then another of Moscow. Others of earlier

campaigns—forming altogether an Iliad of Europefrom 1 789 to 1 81 5." The idea of a chain of ballads,

however, was soon abandoned. A memorandumtwo years later runs as follows :

" Consider a grand

drama, based on the wars with Napoleon, or someone campaign. ... It might be called ' Napoleon '

or 'Josephine5

or by some other person's name."A grand drama : this is only 1877, and it is clear

that the essential plan is already in Hardy's grasp.

He hesitated a little, however, even yet, and in

1 88 1 reverted temporarily to the scheme of an" Homeric Ballad in which Napoleon is a sort of

Achilles." But this was only a belated echo of his

original notion, for in the same month in which he

wrote that note he also wrote this, a very firm

statement, in which for the first time there is a

glimpse of the underlying idea :" Mode for an

historical drama. Action mostly automatic ; reflex

movement, etc. Not the result of what is called

motive, though always ostensibly so, even to the

actors' own consciousness." By the next year

(February, 1882) he has a clear perception of what

59


is to be the core of the work :" Write a history of

human automatism or impulsion, viz., an account

of human action in spite of human knowledge,

showing how very far conduct lags behind the

knowledge that should really guide it." But the

plan was to go on maturing in his mind for twenty

years yet ; not until 1903 (as we have seen) was the

first volume published.

And even then Hardy did not know quite how to

describe it. " A Drama of the Napoleonic Wars "

was the sub-title he adopted at the time, though he

explained that he meant it as a drama " for mental

performance " only. Later, when the second andthird parts appeared, it was called an Epic-Drama,

a name which gives a better suggestion ofthe majestic

scope of the completed work. But the unsatisfac-

toriness of the available terminology is still empha-sised by the first words of the preface, where Hardyspeaks of " The Spectacle here presented in the

likeness of a Drama." There was, in fact, no wordprecisely to fit it

—

was, because, in a sense, we are

in a better position to describe the work (I mean,

to describe the form of it) than Hardy himself.

This is what, without knowing it, he had written

in The Dynasts—it is no wonder he was baffled to

find a suitable term : he had written a super-

scenario for an imaginary super-film (a film " for

mental exhibition " only).

To illustrate this description. The Dynasts—this

Epic-Drama in three parts, nineteen acts, and one

hundred and thirty scenes—begins and ends, it will

be remembered, in what Hardy calls the Overworld,

60


a region corresponding to Milton's Heaven or

Homer's Olympus. The celestial machinery here,

however, is thrillingly modern, and the Beings whospeak are the abstractions of modern thought—or of

Hardy's modern thought—impersonated as PhantomIntelligences. One set of these, the Chorus of the

Pities, approximates (the author explains) to the" Universal Sympathy of human nature." Theothers have various easily discerned significances.

There is the Ancient Spirit of the Years ; there is

the Shade of the Earth ; there are the Spirits

Sinister and Ironic. This assemblage, from its

eyrie, observes and discusses the human action.

But this eyrie, which we, as co-observers share, is nofixed summit ofOlympus. It is an infinitely movablepoint in space—it is, in fact, the eye of a super-

camera. Our very first view from it, which is also

to be our last, is stupendous, and characteristic.

Hardy describes it :" The nether sky opens, and

Europe is disclosed as a prone and emaciated figure,

the Alps shaping like a backbone, and the branching

mountain-chains like ribs, the peninsular plateau

of Spain forming a head." We are given, in fact,

a panorama of the continent from Spain to the

Arctic Ocean, and from France to the " cloud-

combed " Urals. Now, after this opening aerial

prospect, the imaginary camera moves : it advances

towards its object. Hardy says :" The point of

view then sinks downwards through space, and drawsnear to the surface of the perturbed countries,

where the peoples, distressed by events which they

did not cause, are seen writhing, heaving and

61


vibrating in their various cities and nationalities."

The Fore Scene over, the locality alters abruptly.

We find ourselves on a ridge in Wessex, listening to

the passengers of a stage coach talking of Boney.

Then, in succession, we shift to the Ministry of

Marine at Paris, to the House of Commons, to

Boulogne, to Milan, the view sometimes narrowing

to an interior, or beyond that to a " close-up," so

that we can study the expression of Napoleon's

features, sometimes taking its vantage in the middle

air. There is a continual " fading-out "—and" fading-in." " Clouds," Hardy will say, " gather

over the scene and slowly open elsewhere." x The

1 Occasionally the scenes " shut," merely, but as a rule fade—in

haze, rain, sea-mist, the murk of evening :" the scene darkens,"

" the scene over-clouds," " the night-shades close over," " a nebulouscurtain draws slowly across." The fading is often the imaginativecompletion of the scene. At the end of the Fourth Act of the SecondPart the Chorus of Pities echoes the lamentation of the Englishsoldiers rotting upon " the ever wan morass " of Walcheren :

O ancient Delta, where the fen-lights flit !

Ignoble sediment of loftier lands,

Thy humour clings about our hearts and handsAnd solves us to its softness, till we sit

As we were part of it.

Each creeping day creeping files of soldiers carry their dead to

burial

—

Bearing them to their lightless last asiie

Where weary wave-wails from the clammy shore

Will reach their ears no more.

They themselves linger, fading like the mist, soon

—

by this pale sea

To perish silently.

The scene ends with the direction :" The night fog enwraps the

isle and the dying English army."The fading is sometimes accompanied by recession, the scene

dwindling into a miniature :" The point of view recedes, the whole

fabric [of Milan Cathedral] smalling into distance, and becoming

62

THOMAS HARDY AND ' THE DYNASTS'

whole effect, the vision now swooping towards the

point of focus with lightning velocity, now taking in

a panorama through an immense arc, and always

advancing in time, is unique (surely) in literature

and can be strangely impressive. Such a scene as

that of the retreat from Moscow, so viewed, seems

to acquire new pathos. Here, at first, the point of

observation is high amongst shifting clouds, the

earth a mere " confused expanse " below. Throughthe rifts we behold, pitifully diminished in the great

perspective, the line of the Army " once called the

Grand." A flake of snow floats down on it, then

another and another, till " all is phantasmal grey

and white." Small objects are detached from the

caterpillar shape :

These atoms that drop off are snuffed-out souls

Who are enghosted by the caressing snow.

" Endowed with enlarged powers of audition as of

vision [if that is not sound-film, what is ?], we are

struck by the mournful taciturnity that prevails.

Nature is mute. . . . With growing nearness moreis revealed." Marshal Ney, as we come closer, is

recognised, and Napoleon himself is discerned" amid the rest, marching on foot through the snow-

flakes." We see what the soldiers are wearing.

like a rare, delicately carved alabaster ornament." Sounds, too,

fade :" The confused tongues of the assembly [at a London house]

waste away into distance, till they are heard but as the babblings ofthe sea from a high cliff, the scene becoming small and indistinct

therewith. This passes into silence, and the whole disappears."

Sometimes a faint sound remains, like " the soft hiss of the rain that

falls impartially on both the sleeping armies," in the night beforeWaterloo.

63


Now the army approaches a river—it is the Beresina

—and, that we may observe the engagement at the

bridges, "the point of vision descends to earth,

close to the scene of action."

I may refer, briefly, to two other scenes. Thefirst is not, in itself, very significant, but includes a

visual effect which has become, of late, very familiar

to us. We are on the road to Waterloo, watching

the English troops moving back from Quatre Bras,

and the way in which we watch them is interesting.

We observe them as if through the lens of a pursuing

camera, so that the fields and hedges slip by us oneither side as we keep up with the rear of the

column. " The focus of the scene follows the

retreating English army, the highway and its margins

panoramically gliding past the vision of the spec-

tator."

The other impression is recurrent and is, again,

eminently a film effect. It is a device for sym-

bolising the network of determinism that intertwines

the whole action, and is like a view under super-

natural X-rays. " A new and penetrating light

descends on the spectacle, enduing men and things

with a seeming transparency, and exhibiting as one

organism the anatomy of life and movement in all

humanity." Curious filaments appear, forming a

vast web ; these are the

fibrils, veins,

Will-tissues, nerves, and pulses of the Cause.

It is in the Fore Scene that the Spirit of the Years

first gives this demonstration, and again and again

64


at critical moments through the poem the sameweird incandescence brings into view the beating

brain of things. Towards the end, in the very

middle of the battle of Waterloo, the action is immo-bilised and, once more, flooded in the unnatural

glow. " By the lurid light the faces of every row,

square, group and column of men, French and

English, wear the expression of that of people in a

dream. . . . The strange light passes, and the

embattled hosts on the field seem to move inde-

pendently as usual."

All these are visual effects, conceived by a mindof the strongest originality, and surely they anti-

cipate in the strangest way an art that, when they

were imagined, was non-existent. It should be

added that sounds play their part, too ; all sorts of

sounds : the din of bands, the reverberation of

charging hoofs, the music of masquerades, the con-

cussion of guns. Perhaps most memorable are

certain drum and trumpet notes that ring out at

moments of the action. Hardy was well versed in

the routine of the soldierly life (one remembers

Sergeant Troy, and The Trumpet-Major). In this

work he indicates the precise calls he has in mindby bars of music inserted in the text. So, at the

Duchess of Richmond's ball, " suddenly there

echoes into the ballroom a long-drawn metallic

purl of sound, making all the company start." It

is the Generate, and the notes of it are recorded." The loud roll of side-drums is taken up by other

drums further and further away, till the hollow

noise spreads all over the city." A moment or two

65


later the Assemble sounds and the farewells are

taken.

Can one remain unimpressed by the imagination

that shaped, by such novel devices, 1 a spectacle of

such grandeur ?

When we come to the details of the treatment

—

to what is said, rather than what is seen—we are

met by certain difficulties. What, for example, of

the poetry ? That the conception of the whole

work is intrinsically poetical there is no question,

but the expression, as such, often gives us pause.

The human actors speak, chiefly, in blank verse ; it

is not, as a rule, very good blank verse, and can be

very bad, for Hardy had no distinct talent for this

medium. A good deal of prosaic information,

besides, had to be brought in, and the poetry, at

times, finds this difficult to absorb. Though the

news may be very interesting, as that

There Kellermann's cuirassiers will promptly join youTo bear the English backward Brussels way.I go on towards Fleurus and Ligny now,

it may still lie heavily on the verse. Yet verse, one

constantly feels, was the right choice ; at its lowest

levels it is a reminder of the plane upon which weare moving, does something to preserve the key of

the work ; and how effective, at its good moments,

it can be ! In general, no doubt, the mortal

dialogue is less impressive than the antiphonal

1 See an interesting discussion in Dallas Bower's Plan for Cinema

(1936) where a passage from The Dynasts is translated into " shooting

script." The paragraphs above were written in 1932.

66


chanting of the Phantom Intelligences. These

hymns and choruses, or utterances in "a minor

recitative," possess a curious haunting solemnity, a

solemnity enhanced by the strangeness of the

diction and suggestive of the " monotonic delivery"

that Hardy had in mind. " Aerial music " often

accompanies them and adds, in our imagination, to

the unearthliness of the spectral voices. And then

there are the many memorable lyrics, and apart

from lyrics, again, a wealth of assorted material

that takes us back to what we know and love best

in Hardy. Indeed, the vast, ever changing land-

scape of The Dynasts, for all its awe-inspiring

distances, contains many familiar nooks. It is very

pleasant, for example, after the dizzy altitudes of

the Fore Scene, to find ourselves gently set down on a

ridge in Wessex, with old friends all about us.

Egdon Heath is where it was and Granfer Gantle

not far off. We overhear a conversation, and the

style of it is not new to us :

Old Man : Didst ever larn geography ?

Toung Man : No. Nor no other corrupt practices.

Old Man : Tcht-tcht ! Well, I'll have patience, andput it to him in another form. Dost know the world is

round—eh ? I warrant dostn't !

Toung Man : I warrant I do !

Old Man : How d'ye make that out, when th'st neverbeen to school ?

Toung Man : I larned it at church, thank God.Old Man : Church ? What have God A'mighty got

to do with profane knowledge ? Beware that you baint

blaspheming, Jems Purchess !

Toung Man : I say I did, whether or no ! 'Twas the

zingers up in gallery that I had it from. They busted

67


out that strong with " the round world and they that

dwell therein," that we common fokes down undercould do no less than believe 'em.

Some of the later prose scenes, especially those

interspersed among the battle actions, have a

quality of comedy, sometimes quaint, sometimes

grim, that sends the mind to Shakespeare, as it is

sent by so many passages in the novels. In this

little interchange, with its bewildering logic, might

we not be listening to two philosophers from Fal-

staff's ragged regiment ?

First Straggler : Well, 'twas a serious place for a manwith no priming-horn, and a character to lose, so I

judged it best to fall to the rear by lying down. A mancan't fight by the regulations without his priming-horn,and I am none of your slovenly anyhow fighters.

Second Straggler : 'Nation, having dropped my flint-

pouch, I was the same. Ifyou'd had your priming-horn,

and I my flints, mind ye, we should have been there

now? Then, forty-whory, that we are not is the fault

o' Government for not supplying new ones from the

reserve !

But it seems needless to talk of " influences ":

Hardy in such passages feels certain kinds of life

as Shakespeare felt them—but feels them again for

himself.

Everywhere, indeed, as in the novels, it is the

marked individuality of this writer that impresses

us ; and it is the same individuality, manifesting

itself, in the changed conditions, in similar points

of style. Here, for example, is that descriptive

precision we know so well, shaping itself often in

68


imagery, sometimes homely, sometimes faintly eccen-

tric, in either case exact. The battle of Vimiero

begins " with alternate moves that match each

other like those of a chess opening." At Waterloo

the allied squares stand " like little red-brick

castles, independent of each other." Hardy, it is

obvious, had studied the wars so thoroughly that

he could see the battles in his mind's eye with the

utmost distinctness. Then there is the same exacti-

tude—often of a quasi-scientific kind—in giving the

impression of colours and sounds. The evening

star hangs " like a jonquil blossom " in the fading

west of a cloudless midsummer London sky. Thesmoke of a bombardment looks " starch-blue." Thecannonade before Leipzig becomes, by noon, " a

loud droning, uninterrupted and breve-like, as

from the pedal of an organ kept continuously

down." (These quotations are from the ample" stage-directions " : in other words, from the

descriptive portions of the " scenario.") Again, weare continually observing the movements of troops

or of fleets from above, from high above, and the

vision from there, in the longer perspectives, is

just as precise. The transports conveying British

soldiers to the Peninsula look like moths " silently

skimming this wide liquid plain," or like duck-

feathers on a pond, floating on before the windalmost imperceptibly. From our cloudy eminenceover Europe we regard the armies of the Allies

converging on Brussels : they are " long and sinister

black files . . . crawling hitherward in serpentine

lines* like slowworms through grass." In the region

69


of the Upper Rhine the dark and grey columns" glide on as if by gravitation, in fluid figures,

dictated by the conformation of the country, like

water from a burst reservoir ; mostly snake-shaped,

but occasionally with batrachian and saurian out-

lines." (How characteristic is the quaint puncti-

liousness of that last image !)

In such descriptions, and elsewhere, another

typical effect is rendered, that of the ironic indiffer-

ence of Nature. The last extract proceeds :" In

spite of the immensity of this human mechanism onits surface, the winter landscape wears an impassive

look, as if nothing were happening." And so at

Vimiero, " moans of men and shrieks of horses are

heard. Close by the carnage the little Maceira

stream continues to trickle unconcernedly to the

sea." In front of Godoy's palace at Aranjuez " a

mixed multitude of soldiery and populace . . .

shout and address each other vehemently. Duringa lull in their vociferations is heard the peaceful

purl of the Tagus over a cascade in the palace

grounds ":

. . . this will go onward the sameThough Dynasties pass.

Then, too, Hardy (as far as the historical limita-

tions of his present theme allow) still follows his

principle that fiction should interest by unusualness.

There are touches in the detail of the same rich

novelty, obtained, not by far-fetched incident, but

rather by an amazing manipulation of the simplest

elements. Surely no talent of Hardy's is more

70


astonishing than this : I mean his faculty of elicit-

ing the most extraordinary results from the most

ordinary materials. One remembers the passage in

The Return of the Native, in which the youth Charley

takes payment for his services by holding Eustacia's

hand—what Hardy made of that ! Does not some-

thing of the same gift show in this scene ? We are

outside the Guildhall, among a crowd watching

guests drive up for the Lord Mayor's banquet.' A cheer rises when the equipage of any popular

personage arrives at the door." Members of the

crowd talk to each other about the war, and their

conversation is significant and amusing. But Hardywill not rest content with that. There must be

some enlivening stroke, something really novel,

something that one does not have the good fortune

to experience every day of the week (for there is the

core of his philosophy of fiction) . Taking, then, the

materials just as they are, importing nothing, he

invents this : Second Citizen is in the middle of shout-

ing " Pitt for ever !" when he becomes aware, to

his amazement, that though Third Citizen is makingthe facial movements appropriate to cheering, nonoises at all issue from this particular mouth.

Second Citizen : Why, here's a blade opening andshutting his mouth like the rest, but never a sound doeshe raise !

Third Citizen [dourly] : I've not too much breath to

carry me through my day's work, so I can't afford to

waste it in such luxuries as crying Hurrah to aristocrats.

If ye was ten yards off y'd think I was shouting as loudas any.

Second Citizen [scandalized] : It's a very mean practice

71


of ye to husband yourself at such a time, and gape in

dumb-show like a frog in Plaistow Marshes.Third Citizen : No, sir ; it's economy.

Generally, however, the invention is in a grimmerkey and in such scenes as the well-known " Roadnear Astorga," where deserters huddle in a celler,

sharpens sardonically the realities of war. For

Hardy, like certain war novelists of our time, is deter-

mined, as far as may be, to show the whole truth.

From him, too, we learn (as it is proper that weshould) not only how a field of battle looks and howit sounds, but also how it smells ; and not only whathappens in a battle to men, but also what happens

to horses.

Horses ! But, of course, his sympathy extended

far lower down the hierarchy of animal kind.

Hardy was not the sort of man who shares the

feeling of horse or hound, but refuses to enter that

of fox or hare. Still, who would have expected

that in this epic-drama of the wars with Napoleon,

occupied with European conflicts, the clash of

nations and the fall of dynasts, he could find space or

opportunity to express again, as he had so often

expressed it before, his loving tenderness for our

animal kindred, for the small creatures of the field ?

He does find the opportunity ; and no passage in

the work is more typical of his mind, so full of doubts

and high speculations, and, indeed, of deep denials,

and yet so warm in its responses to life. In the

great scenes presenting the crashing tides of Water-

loo he spares a thought for the moles, the hedge-

hogs, the larks, and smaller beings still, whose

72


homes were in that field and who were warned of a" Something to come " from the preparatory move-

ments above :

The snail draws in at the terrible tread,

But in vain ; he is crushed by the felloe-rim;

The worm asks what can be overhead,

And wriggles deep from a scene so grim,

And guesses him safe ; for he does not knowWhat a foul red flood will be soaking him !

Beaten about by the heel and toe

Are butterflies, sick of the day's long rheum,To die of a worse than the weather-foe.

Trodden and bruised to a miry tombAre ears that have greened but will never be gold,

And flowers in the bud that will never bloom.

So Nature is crushed and wounded by the humancommotions, while from this novel viewpoint

—

underneath—hoofs and heels and felloe-rims loomin magnified destructiveness. Yet Hardy's mindis large enough to take in the whole, and the whole

includes glory. The very mention of these com-batants, these places, brings a thrill. Hardy felt

the thrill, too. He writes of Marshal Ney, " hero of

heroes," with quickening fervour. And the villages,

the farmhouses—he will pause to dwell on their

very names. The Spirit of the Pities muses of LaHaye Sainte :

O Farm of sad vicissitudes and strange !

Farm of the Holy Hedge, yet fool of change !

Whence lit so sanct a name on thy now violate grange ?

And for a last example of this embracing sympathy,

73


and especially of the way he responds to the ringing

names, I may quote the battle-song of Albuera. It

is a lyric of battle, and so, glorious ; but ironic andpitiful at the same time, as only Hardy could makesuch a poem :

They come, beset by riddling hail;

They sway like sedges in a gale;

They fail, and win, and win, and fail. Albuera !

They gain the ground there, yard by yard,Their brows and hair and lashes charred,Their blackened teeth set firm and hard.

Their mad assailants rave and reel,

And face, as men who scorn to feel,

The close-lined, three-edged prongs of steel.

Till faintness follows closing-in,

When, faltering headlong down, they spin

Like leaves. But those pay well who win Albuera.

Out of six thousand souls that swareTo hold the mount, or pass elsewhere,

But eighteen hundred muster there.

Pale Colonels, Captains, ranksmen lie,

Facing the earth or facing sky ;

—

They strove to live, they stretch to die.

Friends, foemen, mingle ; heap and heap.

—

Hide their hacked bones, Earth !—deep, deep, deep,

Where harmless worms caress and creep.

Hide their hacked bones, Earth !—deep, deep, deep,

Where harmless worms caress and creep.

What man can grieve ? What woman weep ?

Better than waking is to sleep ! Albuera !

The night comes on, and darkness covers the battlefield.

74


And what is the meaning of it all ? There seems

a caution here to be kept in mind. Hardy often

insisted that beliefs were one matter ; the impres-

sions of life—

" seemings "—conveyed in literature

were another ; and his preface to The Dynasts is

especially non-committal. Deeply pondering (as

nearly everything he wrote showed him to be)" the burthen of the mystery," he was (in his ownwords) " no answerer." The Dynasts holds no system

of teaching. Still, with this proviso, we are cer

tainly entitled to take it as imaging Hardy's pro-

foundest feelings about life. In the conception of

this poem the doubts and misgivings that so manya novel had darkly implied are gathered up and,

once and for all, expressed. The thought itself is

simple : it acquires its peculiarly staggering quality

from the imaginative terms into which it is trans-

lated. Those Spectres, who chant in their weird

monotones, are like presences from the cold, the

outermost depths of space. But there is a Presence

behind even them which seems to fill the drama." Black it stood as Night." We know of it through

the Spirits ; we never see it ; but it is every-

where. It is the Prime Cause, the All ; and the

menace of it lies precisely in its incognisance. It

is not malign, because it is unaware ; it knowsnot what it does, and yet all that is done is doneby it :

Moulding numblyAs in dream,

Apprehending not how fare the sentient subjects of Its

scheme.

J. JO.75


One does not forget the names that Hardy invents

for this being, the Power behind everything : it is

the Immanent Unrecking, the Great Foresightless,

the Inadvertent Mind ; viewless, voiceless, hateless,

loveless, the dreaming, dark, dumb Thing ; or

(and Hardy was the first to give it this ultimate,

this most appalling title of all) It : the omnipotent,

omnipresent Neuter. This dark Presence of The

Dynasts is (surely) one of the really tremendous

images of modern literature.

It looms over the whole poem, and yet the shadowit casts is not quite absolute. In the midst of the

resonant Negative, which sounds through the work,

comes a faint, a very faint, Perhaps. Hardy could

not claim originality for the idea that the driving

force of the universe is unconscious, that the whole

of human conduct is, as the spirit of the Ironies

puts it, a " mechanised enchantment." But another

notion he did think was new. This was the idea of

the " unconscious force as gradually becoming

conscious," of consciousness " creeping further andfurther back towards the origin of force." x Atpresent, Man is exceptional in a universe unawareof him :

" came unmeant " as an accidental

upthrust of intelligence ; hence the misery. But in

this other fancy lies the slight hope. It enters The

Dynasts like a little cheering melody, just a few barely

audible bars amid the crashing discords. After the

1Cf. the lines from Nature's Questioning :

Or are we live remainsOf Godhead dying downwards, brain and eye now gone ?

The reverse process is imagined.

76

THOMAS HARDY AND 'THE DYNASTS 5

death of Nelson, the Chorus of the Years comforts

the depressed Pities :

Nay, nay, nay ;

Your hasty judgments stay,

Until the topmost cymeHave crowned the last entablature of Time.O heap not blame on that in-brooding Will ;

O pause, till all things all their days fulfil !

The injunction to the immortal Pities, in prosaic

language, is something like " Wait and see !" Not

for ever may the Will remain unconscious. Andthis (though a subdued note in the poem) is the

note, nevertheless, upon which Hardy ends. There

is a chorus near the finish, chanted by the Spirits of

the Pities, beginning

To Thee whose eye all Nature owns,Who hurlest Dynasts from their thrones,

And liftest those of low estate,

We sing, with Her men consecrate !

which is like a hymn ; indeed, it is a hymn of

praise to the Wellwilier, the Kindly Might. ThePities themselves, Hardy has warned us, are idealists,

" impressionable and inconsistent "; so their song

carries little authority ; it is, indeed, rather whatthey would like to believe than what they do. It

has this effect, nevertheless, that the Spirit of the

Years is charmed to wistfulness by the beauty of

the chant, and though

Last as first the question rings

Of the Will's long travailings,

the final word is with the Pities. The concluding

77


chorus envisages the day when the Will shall gain

a mind, when Its blindness shall break and " a

genial germing purpose " come into Its doings :

when the Power shall know what It does :

But—a stirring thrills the air

Like to sounds ofjoyance there

That the rages

Of the ages

Shall be cancelled, and deliverance offered from the

darts that were,

Consciousness the Will informing, till It fashion all

things fair !

78

WILLIAM LISLE BOWLES

TO THE REV. W. L. BOWLESMy heart has thank'd thee, Bowles ! for those soft strains

Whose sadness soothes me, like the murmuringOf wild-bees in the sunny showers of spring !

For hence not callous to the mourner's pains

Through youth's gay prime and thornless paths I went :

And when the mightier throes of mind began,

And drove me forth, a thought-bewildered man,Their mild and manliest melancholy lent

A mingled charm, such as the pang consign'd

To slumber, though the big tear it renew'd;

Bidding a strange mysterious pleasure broodOver the wavy and tumultuous mind,As the great spirit erst with plastic sweepMoved on the darkness of the unform'd deep.

S. T. Coleridge.

These lines furnish the excuse for the following

sketch. Bowles had his little day, but he was one

of those poets whose chief function it is to be super-

seded : after a short time his poetry ceased to matter.

His claim on our interest is that he once interested

some other people—Coleridge, above all—very muchindeed. He did not interest them all the time. Helived a long life and wrote steadily through the

greater part of it, and much of what he wrote is,

and always was, without value. Even Coleridge's

enthusiasm dwindled as the years went by. But for

79


a while the poetry of Bowles, or one volume of it,

was not less than an inspiration to Coleridge : a

notable fact, after all, and one which seems to makea reasonable commemoration of him proper. His

amiability, besides, makes it pleasant to recall him.

Bowles, himself a clergyman, was the son andgrandson of clergymen and the eldest of seven

children, whose needs taxed the family income,

augmented though it was by a " small hereditary

property." When he was quite young (he was born

in 1762) the family moved from King's Sutton,

Northamptonshire, to Uphill in Somerset. Bowles

gives recollections of his childhood days. He hadan impressionable, imaginative mind, which his

parents by their tastes helped to develop. Thefather was a lover of nature, the mother was devoted

to music, and Bowles shared their susceptibilities.

He tells how, on that journey to the new parsonage,

the sound of pealing bells lured him from the inn

and the coach was delayed ; or how, as they

travelled by Brockley-Coombe, his father took himby the hand and led him to the vast outlook over the

Severn Valley :" the impression of this beautiful

scene remains with me still, and I believe, from this

circumstance I owe my earliest associations of poetry

with picturesque scenery." His own residence at

Uphill was not a very long one. The Reverend

William Thomas, though a " poor and indigent

scholar," had enough, or was determined to have

enough, to send his eldest and promising son to a

good school. The choice was Winchester. HereBowles performed satisfactorily and attracted the

80


interest of the remarkable headmaster, an expert in

the training of future poets. This was Joseph

Warton, whose services Bowles did not forget andto whom later he paid pleasing tribute in verse. Hethanks Warton in a general way for inspiring his

youthful breast with love of taste, of science and of

truth. Warton revealed to him the greatness of

ancient and modern poets (he names, of the

moderns, Shakespeare, Milton and Ossian), and

sharpened his sensitiveness to nature, so that he

found every breeze on Itchin's brink melody andthe trees waved in fresh beauty for him. AndWarton did more still. He'" unfolded the shrinking

leaves " of Bowies' own fancy, wherefore, his pupil

writes in acknowledgment :

to thee are dueWhate'er their summer sweetness.

Bowles went from Winchester to Oxford, and from

the one Warton to the other. He was fortunate in

his instructors. At Oxford he won a prize for Latin

verse and hoped vainly for a fellowship.

It was when he had just left, or was on the point

of leaving, Oxford, that an experience of great

moment befell him. This was his " first disappoint-

ment in early affections." He had fallen in love

with a niece of Sir Samuel Romilly. Reasons,

chiefly, it would appear, of a financial sort, madethe match impracticable, and Bowles set off ontravel, gradually extending his range from the

wilder parts of North England and Scotland to the

Continent. But rambling was not all his solace.

81


He rhymed as well. It was in the course of these

journeyings, undertaken to deaden the hurt of his

recent sharp distresses, that he put together, from

the same motives, a series of sonnets. Bowles him-

self speaks of the nature and genesis of these sonnets,

and points to their originality. They exhibit

occasional reflections suggested spontaneously bythe scenes amidst which he wandered during this

time ofdepression :" wherever such scenes appeared

to harmonise with his disposition at the moment,the sentiments were involuntarily prompted." Thepoems, he tells us, were not committed to writing at

the time, nor indeed, until quite three years hadelapsed. Then, urged partly by monetary needs, he

suddenly bethought him, as he was passing through

Bath to the banks of the Cherwell, to write downwhat he could remember of these old creations, but" most elaborately mending the versification from

the natural flow of music in which they occurred to

him." Having done so, he took them to Mr.

Cruttwell, printer, of Bath, and offered them as

Fourteen Sonnets, Written Chiefly on Picturesque Spots

During a Journey. Mr. Cruttwell was not impressed

and doubted whether the publication would repay

the cost of printing, which would come to about

five pounds. However, he was at last prevailed

upon to contract for one hundred copies, neither

he nor Bowles expecting much to come of it. But

the results were surprising. " Half a year after-

wards I received a letter from the printer informing

me that the hundred copies were all sold, adding

that if I had published five hundred copies he had

82


no doubt they would have been sold also." Indeed,

the little book went on from edition to edition, until

in 1805 it was being reprinted for the ninth time.

A last edition, with expansions and variations, Bowles

explaining that the pieces " now appear nearly as

they were originally composed in my solitary hours,"

was published in 1837. But the identity of some of

the earliest purchasers of his volume was whatBowles chiefly delighted to remember. Robert

Southey bought his copy from Mr. Cruttwell's shop

in Bath ; Wordsworth propped himself into a niche

on London Bridge and, with his brother waiting,

obstinately read to the last poem ; and Coleridge

inaugurated a Bowles Society at his school, tran-

scribing forty copies of the volume with his ownhand.

In the meantime Bowles had been making not

altogether successful attempts to establish himself.

He hoped to receive assistance from the Archbishop

of Canterbury, to whom his grandfather on the

maternal side had rendered a service in days gone

by. Preferment, however, was not at once forth-

coming, and his life, before it settled to its even

tenor, was to encounter at least one other dis-

tressing passage. He had met a Miss Harriet Wake,daughter of a Prebendary, granddaughter of anArchbishop, and had become very deeply attached

to her. But again his hopes were to be annulled.

Before, worldly circumstances had interfered ; now,when he had resolved that no considerations of

that kind should check him, death intervened.

It was a second cruel blow, but it was the last he

83


was called upon to suffer. Some little time later

(1797) he married the sister of his former fiancee.

Then in 1804, after much waiting for a suitable

appointment, he was presented with the living

of Bremhill, Archbishop Moore, who had at last

come to a sense of his responsibilities, giving him the

preferment.

Bremhill was Bowles' haven. For fifty years he

lived in this hamlet, much loved by his parishioners

and much loving them. His life was sufficiently

active. Apart from his clerical duties, which he

performed with devotion, he was busily occupied.

He engaged himself in county affairs, he acted as

magistrate, he studied antiquities, he fought in

controversies, he wrote biography, criticism andpoetry ; so that, though he rarely went to London,

and always returned with pleasure to his country

parsonage, his name became familiar in manycircles. With his appointment to Bremhill his long

life of usefulness was only at its beginning. But it

was not from now on an eventful life, and there is

little of unexpectedness to record. The most notable

excitement of it was furnished, no doubt, by the

great Pope controversy. Some remarks included

by Bowles in an edition of Pope set in motion a

bitter quarrel about the character and talent of that

poet. It was a dusty and amusing fight, in which

the issues (except to Bowles, and perhaps hardly to

him) were never properly clear from beginning to

end. His two most formidable opponents were

Campbell and Byron ; but Campbell (who really

began the dispute) argued on Bowies' side without

84


knowing it, and Byron, though he argued with gusto

and brilliance, had only a confused idea of what the

theme of the argument precisely was. Bowles was

caused much anguish by the persistent misunder-

standing, and wrote pamphlet on pamphlet in anendeavour to make his position clear ; but it was

quite useless. Everybody believed, and could not

be made to disbelieve, that he had denied that Popewas a poet. However, he contrived to plant someof his blows squarely, and was supplied with whatwas, on the whole, an agreeable preoccupation over

a number of years.

He received various clerical appointments. After

1828, as Canon-Residentiary of Salisbury, he wasabsent from Bremhill for about a quarter of every

year. He may have cherished hopes for a while of

higher offices. But as for fame, he received his

meed, and was well content in the main with his

retirement. His physical and mental powers failed

before the end. He lived until 1850 when he waseighty-eight years of age, and when but one of his

former notable trinity of admirers remained. Words-worth died almost exactly a fortnight later. Bowles

is buried in Salisbury Cathedral, in which he hadhimself erected more than one monument to worthies

of the Church. His wife had died six years before

him.

Bowles was fortunate in his rectorship at Bremhill.

It was a fair piece of country in which his existence

was set ; and apart from that, an extraordinarily

interesting and cultured society was available to

him. Within walking distance from his house on

85


its hill was the Lansdowne mansion. At this great

political rendezvous Bowles was a frequent visitor,

and met a succession of people of note. Slightly

farther off, but only three hours' walk through

Bowood, was the retreat ofTom Moore at Sloperton

Grange. Bowles and Moore, with their friends, metconstantly, and it is in Tom Moore's Journals that

Bowles now lives for us most vividly. Bowles' ownhome, a double-storied vine-clad dwelling adjoining

the church, charmed more than one distinguished

guest, both for the loveliness of its prospect and its

own quaint picturesqueness. Bowles was proud of

his vicarage, and spent a great deal of trouble uponthe grounds, which he laid out in an original scheme.

S. C. Hall speaks of the surprises which met one at

every turn. "It afforded him high gratification to

entertain his friends in these grounds and lead themalong its labyrinthine paths—here to a sylvan altar

dedicated to friendship, there to some temple, grotto

or sundial." Indeed this garden of Bowles' obtained

considerable fame. Here is his own description,

from which the ingenuity of the devices may be

gathered : "A winding path leads to a small piece

of water, originally a square pond. This walk, as it

approaches the water, leads into a darker shade, anddescending some steps, placed to give a picturesque

appearance to the bank, you enter a kind of cave,

with a dripping rill, which falls into the water below,

whose bank is broken by thorns and hazels and

poplars among darker shrubs. Passing round the

water you come to an arched walk of hazels which

leads again to the green in front of the house, where,

86


dipping a small slope, the path passes near an old

and ivied elm. The walk leads round a plantation

of shrubs to the bottom of the lawn, from whence is

seen a fountain, between a laurel arch, and through

a dark passage a grey sundial appears among beds

of flowers, opposite the fountain. The whole of the

small green slope is here dotted with beds of flowers ;

a step, into some rockwork, leads to a kind of

hermit's oratory, with crucifix and stained glass,

built to receive the shattered fragments, as their last

asylum, of the pillars of Stanley Abbey. Thedripping water passes through the rockwork into a

large shell, the gift of a valued friend, the author of

the Pleasures of Memory. Leaving the small oratory,

a terrace of flowers leads to a Gothic stone seat

at the end, and returning to the flower garden, wewind up a narrow path from the more verdant

scene to a small dark path, with fantastic roots

shooting from the bank, where a gravestone appears,

on which an hour-glass is carved. A root house

fronts us, with dark boughs branching over it.—Sit

down in that carved old chair. If I cannot welcomesome illustrious visitor in such consummate verse as

Pope, I may, I hope, with blameless pride, tell you,

reader, in this chair have sat some public characters

distinguished by far more noble qualities than the' noble pensive St. John.' I might add that this

seat has received, among other visitors, Sir SamuelRomilly, Sir George Beaumont, Sir HumphryDavy, poets as well as philosophers ; Madame de

Stael, Dugald Stewart and Christopher North,

Esq. !' Moore treated this garden as something of

87


a joke. " His parsonage at Bremhill is beautifully

situated ; but he has a good deal frittered away its

beauties with grotto hermitages and Shenstonian

inscriptions. When company is coming he cries,

' Here, John, run with the crucifix and missal to the

hermitage and set the fountain going !

5

His sheep

bells are tuned in thirds and fifths. But he is an

excellent fellow notwithstanding."

Indeed Bowles was an excellent fellow. His good-

ness of heart, his impulsive generosities, his quaint

and innocent simplicities, endeared him to his

friends, who loved him and laughed at him. Manya story was told of his absentmindedness, as how,

having presented Mrs. Moore with a Bible and being

requested by her to write her name in it, he did so,

inscribing the sacred volume to her very graciously

as a gift " from the Author." Several varieties of

nervousness afflicted him. Rogers tells how, with

his devotion to music, Bowles came to Londonexpressly to attend the last commemoration of

Handel. " After going into the Abbey he observed

that the door was closed. Immediately he ran to

the door-keeper, exclaiming, * What, am I to be

shut up here ? ' and out he went." But this fear was

serious and distressing. He had other aversions

almost equally inconvenient. As he told Moore, he

could never let a tailor measure him, thinking it

" horrible ":

" The fellow must merely look at his

shapes and make the best he can of it. The newcoat he then had on was concocted, he told us, in

this manner, and from a very hasty glance, evi-

dently." Not less diverting were his slips and errors.

88


" Bowles, who cannot speak French," runs an entry

in the Journal, " holding a conversation with the

Judge, come from France to study English juris-

prudence, and bellowing out to him as if he were

deaf—asking him ' Did he know Nancy ? ' pro-

nouncing it in the English way." But he was good

company at table. " Bowles very amusing and oddat dinner : his account of his shilling's worth of

sailing at Southampton, and then two shillings'

worth, and then three, as his courage rose. One of

the boatmen who rowed him had been with Clapper-

ton in Africa, and told Bowles of their having one

day caught a porpoise, and on opening it, finding a

black man, perfect and undissolved, in its belly, the

black man having been thrown overboard from someslave-ship. After for some time gravely defending

this story against our laughter, he at last explained

that it was a shark he meant, not a porpoise."

After some of their gatherings, Bowles would feel

ashamed of his excessive abandon and would go to

Moore for reassurance. " Bowles called, evidently

uneasy at the exhibition he made of himself yesterday

evening ; but I assured him that nothing could be

more delightful, and that such playfulness and bon-

homie could leave no other impression behind than

that of pleasure, which is very nearly the truth."

Towards the end of his life his deafness provided

additional amusement. " Bowles came after break-

fast more odd and ridiculous than ever. His delight

at having been visited yesterday by the PrimeMinister and Secretary of State, Lord Lansdownehaving taken them both to Bremhill. The foolish

89


fellow had left his trumpet at home, so that we could

hardly make him hear, or indeed, do anything with

him but laugh. Even when he has his trumpet he

always keeps it to his ear when he is talking himself,

and then takes it down when anyone else begins to

speak. To-day he was putting his mouth close to

my ear and bellowing as if I were the deaf man, not

he. We all pressed him to stay to dinner but in

vain ; and one of his excuses was, ' No, not indeed,

I cannot ; I must go back to Mrs. Moore.' Rogers

very amusing afterwards about the mistake : 'It

was plain,' he said, ' where Bowles had been all this

time ; taking advantage of Moore's absence '."

Moore's Journal contains a delightful series of

little glimpses that leave, in their totality, an amusing

and perfect picture ; I quote, at random, a few

further extracts :" Bowles showed me a part of his

library, in which was collected, he told me, all the

books illustrative of the divines of the time of

Charles I. and the theology of that period. Thefirst book I put my hand on in this sacred corner

was a volume of Tom Brown's works, etc. Bowles

was amused in the midst of all his gravity by this

detection. What with his genius, his blunders, his

absences, etc. he is the most delightful of all existing

parsons or poets." " Bowles objected to the lines of

Burns,

And yet the light that led astray

Was light from Heaven !

as profane." " Bowles called : is in a great fidget

about his answer to Brougham ; brought me a copy

90


of it ; showed me a note he had just had in praise

of it, from his friend, the Bishop of London, begin-

ning, ' My dear Bowles V s " Received a letter from

Bowles, with a very pretty poem, written by him at

Sloperton Gate, on his pony insisting upon stopping

with him there." " Bowles called. Asked him to

return to dinner with us, which he did. Is going

pell-mell into controversy again. Roscoe has

exposed a carelessness of his with regard to one of

Pope's letters, which he is going to write a pamphlet

to explain. Mentioned an acquaintance of his, of

the name of Lambert, who took a fancy to go to

Egypt. When he came back someone said to him,' Well, Lambert, what account of the Pyramids ?

'

* The Pyramids ? What are they ? I never heard

of them !' Was called, ever after, Pyramid

Lambert." " Dined at Bowies' party. Never sawBowles in more amusing plight

;played for us on a

fiddle after dinner a country dance, which forty

years ago he heard on entering a ball-room, to which

he had rode, I don't know how many miles, to meeta girl he was very fond of, and found her dancing

to this tune when he entered the room. The senti-

ment with which he played the old-fashioned jig

beyond anything diverting." " A visit from Bowles,

who is in a most amusing rage against the bishops,

on account of the transfer into their hand by the

new Church reforms of the preferment and patronage

hitherto vested in the Dean and Chapter. NoRadical could be much more furious on the subject

than this comical Canon in his own odd way. Ondriving off from the door, he exclaimed to Mrs.

j.j.o.QI


Moore, ' I say, down with the bishops !' " " Bowles

sent me, this morning, a Latin epitaph (ancient, I

believe) and his own translation of it, with both of

which he seems mightily pleased. The original (as

well as I can remember) is as follows :' Hie jacet

Lollius juxta viam ut dicant praeterientes, Lolli

vale l

91

Translation :

Here Lollius lies, beside the road,

That they who journey by,

May look upon his last abode,And, ' Farewell, Lollius,' sigh.

This last line is as bad as need be, and so Lord

Holland seemed to think as well as myself. I sug-

gested as at least a more natural translation of it :

And say, ' Friend Loll, goodbye !

'

which Lord Holland improved infinitely by makingit :

And say, < Toll Loll, goodbye !'"

And so we read of their happy days, their glee-

parties, their excursions. Now Bowles' head is giddy

looking over a cliff ; now he is found in the bar of

the White Hart dictating his latest pamphlet on the

Sublime and the Beautiful to a waiter, pressed into

service as secretary ; now, at an evening gathering

he escapes annihilation by a hair's-breadth :" When

Butler's Analogy was mentioned, Parr said in his

usual pompous manner, ' I shall not declare, before

the present company, my opinion of that book.'

Bowles, who was just then leaving the room,1

Cf. Dessau, 6746 Inscriptiones Selecta.

92


muttered, ' Nobody cares what you think of it.'

Parr, overhearing him, roared out, ' What's that

you say, Bowles ? ' and added, as the door shut on

the offender, ' It's lucky that Bowles is gone, for I

should have put him to death '."

But it is time to turn from the picture of this

delightful canon (" Was there ever such a Parson

Adams since the real one ? " asked Moore) to a brief

inspection of the verses that drew once such marvel-

lous acclaim. The praise leaves us a little puzzled

now. The sonnets have charm, but it is a mild

charm, and, to us at least, a commonplace charm.

That, of course, is the point. The charm was not

commonplace just then, and there was something of

real novelty in poems so authentic, if so quiet, in

their strains ; so unaffected, if so unarresting, in

their feeling. Bowles had suffered a grief and by an

unusual faculty had found a simple and natural

voice to sing his sorrows.

The note of the poems is subdued melancholy,

mingled with a certain quiet steadfastness. Nature

was his help in his trouble and the most characteristic

of his pieces utter his gratitude for this refuge. In

rivers he found solace : in the Rhine, with its wild

splendours ; but especially in the humbler loveliness

of native streams, Itchin and Cherwell and Wains-

beck. So he pondered by Tweed and found com-fort :

O Tweed ! a stranger, that with wandering feet

O'er hill and dale has journeyed many a mile,

(If so his weary thoughts he might beguile)

Delighted turns thy stranger stream to greet.

93


The waving branches that romantic bendO'er thy tall banks a soothing charm bestow

;

The murmurs of thy wandering wave belowSeem like the converse of some long-lost friend.

Delightful stream ! though now along thy shore

When Spring returns in all her wonted pride

The distant pastoral pipe is heard no more,Yet here while laverocks sing I could abide

Far from the stormy world's contentious roar,

To muse upon thy banks at eventide.

So, in typical vein, he recalls a landing at Tyne-

mouth Priory after a tempestuous voyage, and the

serenity of the changed scene :

As slow I climb the cliff's ascending side,

Much musing on the track of terror past,

When o'er the dark wave rode the howling blast,

Pleased I look back and view the tranquil tide

That laves the pebbled shore : and now the beamOf Evening, smiles on the gray battlement,

And yon forsaken tower that time has rent.

The lifted oar far off with transient gleamIs touched, and hushed is all the billowy deep.

Soothed by the scene, thus on tired Nature's breast

A stillness slowly steals, and kindred rest

;

While sea-sounds lull her, as she sinks to sleep,

Like melodies that mourn upon the lyre,

Waked by the breeze, and, as they mourn, expire.

Impressions like these refreshed the heart ofBowles

after its afflictions ; nor did that other influence fail

of its efficacy, and the music of the bells at Ostend

woke him to a pleasure enhanced by memory :

How sweet the tuneful bells' responsive peal !

As when, at opening morn, the fragrant breeze

Breathes on the trembling sense of pale disease,

So piercing to my heart their force I feel.

94


And hark ! with lessening cadence now they fall.

And now, along the white and level tide,

They fling their melancholy music wide;

Bidding me many a tender thought recall

Of summer days, and those delightful years

When from an ancient tower, in life's fair prime,

The mournful magic of their mingling chimeFirst wak'd my wondering childhood into tears

;

But seeming now, when all those days are o'er

The sounds ofjoy once heard and heard no more.

Is it strange to hear that these poems did

Coleridge's heart " more good than all the other

books he ever read excepting the Bible " ? No doubt

it is. Still, one remembers that he was young whenhe read them, and that he was in need just then of

a particular kind of assistance. How shall weexamine these mysterious transactions of the soul ?

It is enough that the sentimentalism of Bowles wasprecisely what, at the moment, the spirit of

Coleridge required for its health. He tells us of the

burial of his intellect " in the unwholesome quick-

silver mines of metaphysic lore," and of the " genial

influence " that drew him thence to " pluck the

flower and reap the harvest from the cultivated

surface." There seems something comprehensible

there, and the " genial influence " itself is perhaps

not irrecognisably gone.

There was, however, another interest in these

sonnets : their expression. Naturalness of feeling

was much ; but here too (and this roused Coleridge

to enthusiasm) a certain naturalness of utterance

had been found as well. Here was someone whowith an astonishing recovery of independence had

95


been able to regard nature with clear eyes and to

speak of his impressions simply. The two faculties

went together. As the vision cleared the fit andnatural words came, yet it was just because Bowles

through some divine grace had escaped the net of

conventional phrase that he could see things so

freshly. Once again, of course, we must make a

certain imaginative effort if we are to perceive the

freshness ourselves. "It is peculiar to original

genius to become less and less striking, in proportion

to its success in improving the taste and judgment of

its contemporaries.' ' This reminder by Coleridge

may serve us as our text. The newness of Bowies'

diction has long since vanished, but we can still

acknowledge a soft charm in the unpretending

phrase :

Soothed by the scene, thus on tired Nature's breast

A stillness slowly steals, and kindred rest;

While sea-sounds lull her, as she sinks to sleep.

" Natural language, neither bookish, nor vulgar,

neither redolent of the lamp, nor of the kennel "

—

we may still agree to that ; nor stiff, nor cold, nor

dead-coloured, if dim and with little quality of

penetration. We read with a mild and lulled

acquiescence, and can understand that the humblesheaf of poems was once found grateful to the poetic

sense. Bowles afterwards ventured beyond the

circle of such gentle, restful suggestion—his true

scope—and in more ambitious attempts his charmwas lost. But for this note he had a certain gift, andcan generally find fit words for the hush of evening,

96


a peaceful landscape, some soothing solitude. Hedoes not always find them, and has lapses into trite

proprieties of diction :" The orient beam illumes

the parting oar," " yonder azure track," " the

reckless main." Personification, too, is a danger,

but as yet his Hopes and Sorrows and Despairs have

not become nuisances and are easily ignored. Onthe whole, the verses of the early volume do " com-bine natural thoughts with natural diction," are

melodious and truthful, and reveal a felt beauty.

In his best lines there is a certain not unskilfully

wrought identity of sound, rhythm and feeling,

though it is usually narrowed to that one manner in

which he was really happy. He has strayed byCherwell

or when the morn beganTo tinge the distant turret's golden fan

Or evening glimmered o'er the sighing sedge.

On the slope of the Coomb he has watched

The poplars sparkle in the passing beam.

And he liked to convey the effect of low sounds in a

stilly air,

When hush'd is the long murmur of the main.

This youthful volume contains Bowles' master-

pieces ; he never did anything so well again. But

the collected poetry in Gilfillan's edition runs to twovolumes of three and a half hundred pages each.

It was no difficulty to Bowles to write poetry, andhis fluency increased with his age. Only in someshorter pieces, however, like his Monody on Matlock,

97


did he recapture a little of the former felicity.

Pensively, in these, he takes his station in somedelightful vale, or on an eminence commanding a

fair prospect, and there " meditates his casual

theme,55

finding content or recreation or at least

" some mild improvement on his heart Poured sad,

yet pleasing.55

It is of a little interest, in the morepretentious works, to watch the symptoms of the

change in poetry : the fresh delight in nature, andwith nature in picturesque and " romantic

55 moods;

with that, the attraction to the exotic, to strange

lands and histories ; in another direction, the

rehabilitation of humble life in which new andpathetic subjects for poetry are discovered. But

Bowles by now was left behind ; he was no longer a

pioneer but a straggler ; and there was nothing that

he could do in these spheres that was not already

being done far more capably by others. Thus, in

The Spirit of Discovery by Sea he produces a poemreminiscent of some of Southey5

s narratives, at least

in the remote scene, the geographical lore, the

descriptions of heathen rites, and the like. Wetravel far in the five books of this poem and on no

clear system :

all discoveries jumbled from the Flood,

Since first the leaky ark reposed in mud,By more or less, are sung in every bookFrom Captain Noah to Captain Cook.

Byron's summary is very nearly true. Bowles

indeed makes a great tale of unity in his intro-

duction, not perceiving that the very compulsion to

expound in detail the method by which he has

98


secured it indicates pretty clearly that he has not

secured it. Transitions are justified in general byhis being " reminded," without his inquiring further

whether it is proper or not that he should be

reminded. In other respects The Spirit of Discovery

represents fairly the ambitions he had in mind in

most of his long poems, and shows how unfitted he

was to pursue them. It is in fact a species of dwarf-

epic, full of pseudo-Miltonism. Commencing with

appropriate invocation to the shade of Camoens,it passes soon to a resonant catalogue ; in a vision

He saw in mazy longitude devolvedThe mighty Brahma-Pooter ; to the East

Thibet and China, and the shining sea

That sweeps the inlets ofJapan, and windsAmid the Curile and Aleutian isles.

Pale to the North, Siberia's snowy scenes

Are spread; Jenisca and the freezing Ob

Appear, and many a forest's shady track

Far as the Baltic, and the utmost boundsOf Scandinavia.

So generally he observes the idiom :

Let the songReveal, who first went down to the great sea

In ships.

And we have Miltonic echoes :

Anon was heardThe sound as of strange thunder, from the

mouthsOf hollow engines.

But the style was quite too high for him and the

scope beyond his powers. Even his descriptive

99


passages, which might have been supposed in his

line of strength, fail notably. He seems reluctant to

commit himself more than can be helped and his

exotic scenes amount, after all, only to a pervading" umbrageousness." The poem, too, offers anexample of that particularly fatuous sentimentalism

to which he succumbed in his later effusions. Oneof his stagy woodland scenes was the setting for the

episode of Anna—the Anna who " performed " with

her Robert the kiss that interested Byron. Zarco,

one of the scouts of Prince Henry the Navigator,

comes upon a tomb (the scene is a glade in Madeira)

grey and moss-covered. Inspecting the tomb, he

finds the mouldered name, Anna D'Arfet ; and so,

neatly, we have the occasion for our episode. Annawould not obey the wishes of her cruel father, wishes

that would have consigned his only child and hope

to loath'd embraces and a life of tears. Rather, she

fled o'er the main with him she loved. He said :

Haste with me;

We shall find out some sylvan nook, and thenIf thou should'st sometimes think upon these hills

When they are distant far, and drop a tear,

Yes, I will kiss it from thy cheek and clasp

Thy angel beauties closer to my breast;

And whilst the winds blow o'er us, and the sun

Sinks beautifully down, and thy soft cheek

Reclines on mine, I will enfold thee thus,

And proudly cry, My friend, my love, my wife.

The good Bowles, he feels it all. So they came to

Madeira ; but neither ship nor sail appeared to

rescue them and they perished : Anna first, then

ioo


Robert, stretched beside the tomb he had inscribed

with her name :

His arm upon the mournful stone

He dropped ; his eyes, ere yet in death they closed,

Turned to the name, till he could see no more" Anna."

Bowles, however, had not told the story with perfect

lucidity of syntax at every point and Byron was sadly

confused. In the woods of Madeira, Bowles hadwritten,

a kiss

Stole on the list'ning silence ; n'er till nowHere heard ; they trembled even as if the power

and so on. " That is," was Byron's comment, " the

woods of Madeira trembled to a kiss, very muchastonished, as well they might be, at such a pheno-

menon "; adding, of Robert and Anna : "a pair

of constant lovers, who performed the kiss above

mentioned, that startled the woods of Madeira."

Nor was he at first to be dissuaded from his inter-

pretation. However, Bowles convinced him of his

error and he amended his note :" Misquoted and

misunderstood by me, but not intentionally. It was

not the woods, but the people in them, who trem-

bled ; why, heaven knows, unless they were over-

heard making the prodigious smack."

The Spirit ofDiscovery was Bowles' most pretentious

poem on the larger scale ; in the others no saving

excellences appeared. The Missionary conveys us to

the Andes and regales us with a sentimental story of

a young Indian's fortunes in love.

I've read the MissionaryPretty, very

—

IOI


Byron wrote ironically to Murray. Some did find

it pretty and a second edition was called for.

Bowles had published the work anonymously ; nowhe avowed it and made certain alterations. Verygravely he tells us that he has " availed himself of

every sensible objection, the most material of which

was the circumstance, that the Indian maid,

described in the first book, had not a part assigned

to her of sufficient interest in the subsequent events

of the poem, and that the character of the Missionary

was not sufficiently personal." He points out

proudly that, with the single exception of the

massacre of Spaniards, all the personages and events

of the poem are imaginary. Imaginary they maybe, but they are not imagined. Nor, again, is the

scenery of much moment. He selected South

America, he tells us, because the ground wasinteresting, new, poetical and picturesque. But his

local colour consists of a few marmozets, opossums,

cogul-flowers and cocoa-trees. Sometimes, as he

points out, he can draw on personal knowledge." The alpaca is perhaps the most beautiful, gentle

and interesting of living animals ; one was to be

seen in London in 1 812." So we have the tender

portrait :

The tame alpaca stood and licked her hand;

She brought him gathered moss and loved to deckWith flowery twine his tall and stately neck,

Whilst he with silent gratitude replies,

And bends to her caress his large blue eyes.

Bowies' remaining flights in the more ambitious

kind may be left : Banwell Hilly The Grave of the Last

102


Saxon and others. An occasional line in these long

poems strikes the ear, " The sad survivors of a buried

world," " Swell to their solemn roar the deepening

chords," but, on the whole, the less said about themthe better.

It must not be thought, however, that these epics

and half-epics kept Bowles fully occupied. There are

odes, ballads, elegies, inscriptions, hymns, epitaphs,

a dramatic sketch. He commemorates his friends,

pays tribute to his favourite music and his favourite

pictures, finds lessons in trees and stones. Fewnoted men died without his honouring them—Byron,

Southey, Nelson and many another have their dirges

and memorial stanzas. He celebrates private events

and public, a visit to his parsonage, a speech of

Burke's. Towards the end of his life he composedhis Villagers

1' Verse Book, a collection of little pieces

for the children whom Mrs. Bowles taught onSundays on the parsonage green. The object of

these poems was " briefly to describe the most

obvious images in country life, familiar to every

child ; and in the smallest compass to connect every

distinct picture with the earliest feelings of humanityand piety, in language which the simplest might

understand." Some of them were not ill-adapted

to their purpose, and in their gentle simplicity wecome near again to the Bowles of an earlier day

—

the Bowles who had once charmed Coleridge with

his " softened tones, to Nature not untrue."

103

' MACBETH

'

If we ask ourselves : what is the distinction of

Macbeth among Shakespeare's plays ? and, in par-

ticular : what quality differentiates it most remark-

ably from the other great tragedies ? surely we mustanswer : the extreme rapidity of its tempo. Its

unusual brevity assists, but does not mainly account

for, this effect. Macbeth exceeds by a mere two

hundred lines or so the shortest of all Shakespeare's

plays, The Comedy of Errors ; the longest of them,

Antony and Cleopatra, is nearly twice its length. Weare tempted at times (as Professor J. W. Mackail has

recently pointed out) to confuse difference of length

with difference of rate, and to assume, when we are

off our guard, that because a play is long it must be

slow, and because it is brief it must be fast. Anyonewho visits the films will not need to be told that a

very short play—a play far shorter than mayordinarily be seen on the stage—can seem intolerably

sluggish in its movement. As for Shakespeare, he

was too skilful a dramatist to permit any play, even

the longest, to drag. Thus, Hamlet is a very long

play, but its action, for the most part, is very rapid.

And yet, when we compare Hamlet—to take what is

perhaps the extreme instance—with Macbeth, weobserve a real difference. The action of Hamlet is

rapid—for the most part. It is not rapid all the time.

104

6 MACBETH

'

The long soliloquies, though so essential for the

meaning, slightly retard, while they are being

spoken, the pace of this drama. Again, in such

scenes as those which present Hamlet's meeting with

the players, his colloquy with the gravediggers, his

teasing of Osric, the forward movement of the play

has become very slow ; that is not to say that these

scenes in themselves are not very interesting. Oncemore, the lines in which Polonius enunciates his wise

counsels involve, momentarily, the virtual sus-

pension of the action : the drama, as it were, pauses

for these few seconds while Polonius delivers himself

of his accumulated wisdom.

Let us contrast Macbeth. At one part of the play

the action is noticeably delayed ; this is in the fourth

act, where Malcolm and Macduff converse at

inordinate length and where the royal cure of the" evil " is described ; here the drama lags a little.

But how exceptional, how uncharacteristic this

passage is ! For the rest, if we try to imagine scenes

in Macbeth that might have corresponded to the

talk between Hamlet and the players, we feel at

once how impossible in this tragedy such excursions

would have been. There is a quality of leisure in

Hamlet that has no place here, for, indeed, no other

play of Shakespeare's is so swift, so furious in its

movement.It is interesting to observe how closely this quite

extraordinary vehemence in the action of Macbeth

is matched by the style. The language of the play

is full of splendour, but it is a splendour with little

of calm in it. The style, of all the varied dramatic

105


styles of Shakespeare, is the tensest, the most excited.

The breathless interchanges of question and answer

are to a certain degree responsible for this effect :

Did not you speak ?

When?Now.

As I descended?Ay.Hark!

The passages of self-communion are in a vein as

different as possible from Hamlet's " To be or not

to be "; in general, the soliloquies and the asides

are nervous or distraught. So, as Macbeth ponders

what the witches have told him, his hair rises at

his horrible imaginings ; later, as he consults the

sisters for the second time, his heart " throbs " as

he prepares to put his question. Again, the occa-

sional violence of phrase (" smoked with bloody

execution," " unseam'd him from the nave to the

chaps "), the wild magnificence of much of the

imagery (" pity . . . striding the blast," " the

sightless couriers of the air"), the constant allusion

to the portentous, as if the frame of things were

indeed becoming disjointed—all these add to our

impressions of terror. And even when the pitch of

the dialogue is lower, the quietness is often unnatural,

the kind of quietness that may mask a rising hys-

teria. So, after the ghost of Banquo has withdrawn,

Macbeth comments :

the time has beenThat, when the brains were out, the man would die :

the remark suggests feelings barely under command,

1 06

< MACBETH '

likely to burst forth at any moment in shouts of

uncontrolled laughter. And there is much the samenote, but more terribly subdued, in Lady Mac-beth's dreamy reminiscence—the calmness nownear that of insanity :

" Yet who would have

thought the old man to have had so much blood in

him ?"

Indeed, the emotional tension of the play is so

great, its crises so hectic, that it can only remind

one in its course of a fever. Life itself comes to

seem like that to Macbeth, and he envies Duncan,sleeping well after all the fitful unrest of existence.

Many of the details of the play are like the alarms

of nightmare : the voice that cried " Sleep nomore !

" to Macbeth ; the restlessness and fright of

the slumbering grooms ; the dreams that come to

Macbeth and his wife and shake them nightly in

terror ; the hallucination of the dagger ; the sleep-

walking. And is there not, at the finish, a sugges-

tion of the apathy, the languor, that is left by a

long delirium ? Macbeth has plunged on and on,

wasting in crime his reserves of energy, sacrificing

all hopes and destroying for ever the peace of his

spirit. At the end an infinite fatigue descends

upon him, the despair of emotional exhaustion :

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,Creeps in this petty pace from day to day . . .

and

I 'gin to be aweary of the sun,

And wish the estate o' the world were now undone.

There is one other agency in the play that

mo. IQ7


enhances still further this impression as of a fevered

nightmare : the lurid colouring. The play is

vividly pictorial and seems designed in red andblack. The red, needless to say, is the red of blood :

the blood into which Macbeth steps so far that it

is as tedious to return as to go o'er ; the blood that

to his overwrought imagination might incarnadine

the ocean ; the blood that " bolters " Banquo, the

blood with which Lady Macbeth gilds the faces of

the grooms, that is the " filthy witness " on her

husband's hands, that, at the last, is not to be

cleansed from her own by all the perfumes of

Arabia. The play is " laced " with blood.

The black is the darkness ; a darkness not, like

that of King Lear, reaching to heaven, rent with

hurricanoes and split with cataracts. The darkness

here, for all the " unruliness " of the elements, is of

a different quality—brooding, dense, oppressive.

Light thickens, and the crowMakes wing to the rooky wood

;

Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,

Whiles night's black agents to their preys do rouse.

That is the atmosphere of this play. So Lady Mac-beth invokes " thick night," palled in " the dunnest

smoke of hell," to hide as if by a " blanket " her

deed from heaven. This night is " seeling," it

" scarfs up the tender eye of pitiful day," and,

encroaching upon the hours of light, " strangles the

travelling lamp " and " entombs " the face of earth.

In such darkness nature itself seems " dead," and

it is under the cloak of it—the very stars hiding their

1 08

« MACBETH

'

fires, that light may not see into the depths of

Macbeth's heart—that the crucial scenes of the

drama run their course.

The play, indeed, opens in murk—the " fog and

filthy air " in which the weird sisters are holding

their colloquy—and at once a mysterious harmonyis established between these " midnight hags "

—

creatures of darkness—and the obscure unconfessed

impulses in Macbeth's soul. There is even (as has

often been observed) a verbal link, an ironic hint

of the connection.

Fair is foul, and foul is fair,

the witches sing as they vanish. Macbeth, entering

soon afterwards, innocently echoes the phrase in his

own first remark :

So foul and fair a day I have not seen.

It is as if the pass-word of the evil beings has been

secretly whispered in his ear ; and his next utter-

ance, as he challenges the weird women and bids

them tell him what they are, is the last in the play

that he speaks with a clear and untroubled mind.

A moment later they begin their " all hail's " anddisturbance has come into his soul.

The processes in this " temptation " of Macbeth(if, for want of a better word, we may still call it

that) are shown with wonderful mastery and per-

suasive power, so that each step affects us as inevit-

able. We are made to see very clearly, in the first

place, that he responds too readily—and with a

109


strange, unnatural readiness—to the salutations, as

if deep-hidden thoughts, long resident in his mindand perhaps sternly repressed, have suddenly

sprung to life at these mysterious greetings.

All hail, Macbeth ! that shalt be king hereafter !

It is this address especially that produces the changein him, a change so striking that Banquo's atten-

tion is withdrawn for a moment from the speakers

while he regards with astonishment the altered

demeanour of his friend : and Macbeth has not yet

said a word. Banquo questions him :

Good sir, why do you start, and seem to fear

Things that do sound so fair ?

Banquo's own response is perfectly normal. He is

interested and curious, and a little disappointed

that he himself has not figured in such glorious

predictions, but not in the least disturbed ; to himthe words sound only " fair." They are not fair-

sounding to Macbeth (or if they are, sinister under-

tones accompany them), for they suddenly formulate

—this is the shock he has received—secret andguilty aspirations within his own breast. So he

standscirapt," plunged in frowning reverie. A

little later Banquo draws the attention of Ross andAngus to their " partner," still " rapt," his mindseething with the conflicting thoughts that the

encounter has provoked ; and later still, it is the

word he uses in his own letter to his wife narrating

the marvel :" Whiles I stood rapt in the wonder

of it." The prophecies of the witches, it is evident,

no

< MACBETH

»

have set in motion ideas that are stirring his very

being.

But, of course, it is the immediate confirmation of

the second greeting that makes, so naturally, the

profoundest impression on him, for it seems to lend

a terrible validity to the utterances of these creatures.

Who could have doubted, after this, that they had" more in them than mortal knowledge " ? Thewitches, as we know, have hailed him with three

titles, Glamis, Cawdor, King-to-be. It is fortune-

telling on a superlative scale, and we may gauge

easily, by the effects this art can exert on our ownfeelings when we let ourselves be swayed, the state

of Macbeth's mind. The first part of the triple

salutation is recognised by him as already a truth :

he knows he is thane of Glamis. This is like a

guarantee of good faith and would have been

sufficient, by itself, to win attention. A few momentslater, as he is left burning with curiosity concerning

the other titles, Ross and Angus come on the scene,

and Ross hails him by the second—thane of Cawdor.

We can measure the terrible emotion that this

greeting sends through him by the exclamation of

the level-headed Banquo. A minute or two pre-

viously Banquo was calmly interested in the pro-

phecies ; now he shows real amazement :

What, can the devil speak true ?

As for Macbeth, his confused feelings come to us in

four successive asides, and we are made to follow

with poignant sympathy and suspense the move-

ments of his mind. He struggles between exulta-

iii


tion and dread. He can no longer doubt that

destiny is shaping events towards a certain end, andthe recognition of what the goal is brings an over-

mastering thrill :

Two truths are told,

As happy prologues to the swelling act

Of the imperial theme :

" the imperial theme ": his excitement breathes

in the glorious phrasing. The second part of the

same aside discloses the lurking terror behind the

thrill. It is significant that he speaks of the pro-

phecies as " supernatural soliciting " : the word" soliciting ' is ominous, for the witches have

merely announced events, and two have already

come to pass without his lifting a finger. If he feels

that the third will demand intervention from him-

self it can only be because he is permitting his ownguilty impulses to come to fight, and the sight of

them is terrifying to his better soul. It is true that

in his next aside he makes to this better part of his

nature a formal declaration of the stand he means to

take :

Ifchance will have me king, why, chance may crown meWithout my stir.

That is right and admirable, but the words do not

carry conviction ; we imagine that their real

function is to quieten, momentarily, his con-

science ; he is acting to himself. The aside which

follows is more genuine, and shows a mind full of

trouble :

Gome what come may,Time and the hour runs through the roughest day.

112

< MACBETH

*

But the tone of this is very different and his ownposition left more dubious. " Come what comemay "

: but what comes may be through his action ;

he is not now committing himself. Our impression

is increasingly of his helplessness to resist an awful

fascination ; he is being steadily drawn towards

some dark deed, attracted by the regal vision that

the witches have shown him. Presently a slight

obstruction appears to raise itself : Malcolm is

appointed Prince of Cumberland : and now, at

this threat to what he was beginning to accept as

determined by the fates, the strength of his desires

is for the first time fully revealed to himself. Headmits that they are black and deep, but at the

same time consciously wills that to be

Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.

Yet, though he has already become involved

—

perhaps beyond escape—the way is still far from

simple for Macbeth. How different is his wife !

From the moment that she receives the letter all is

clear, no qualm disturbs her ; her only concern is

of ways and means. Macbeth has nothing of this

single-heartedness. Despite the avowal of his last

aside, he arrives at the castle moody and harassed,

his face, says Lady Macbeth, a book

where menMay read strange matters.

She takes the future for granted and assumes that

their only problem is to plan the when and the howof the murder. But Macbeth s markedly with-

ii3


drawn, temporises, will not confess that he per-

ceives the sinister double meaning in her words." Duncan comes here to-night," he announces, and

to his wife's pregnant query :" And when goes

hence ? " answers tamely :" To-morrow, as he

purposes." It is left to her to draw the obvious

moral, but he steadily refuses to be enticed into

discussion, putting the whole matter off with " Wewill speak further." It is as if his abhorrence has

conquered his ambition, as if the whole grim

project has become finally repulsive to him.

We learn much of his nature from this hesitancy." Fear " is an easy word, and Lady Macbeth, with

a practical end in view, finds the taunt effective.

His last feeble objection :" If we should fail ?

'

gives her the chance to overwhelm him with her

scorn. But it is clear that the material risks of the

enterprise are among the least of his anxieties. LadyMacbeth comes closer to the sources of his trouble

when she speaks of his wish to act " holily," a wish,

as she interprets it, that springs from mere unmanlytimidity. He is, she thinks, too soft,

too full o' the milk of human kindness

To catch the nearest way.

And it is true that he has his share of commonweaknesses and scruples. He is so far a normal

man that he enjoys possessing the " golden opinions"

of people and hates the idea of losing them. Norcan he face without a shudder the spiritual isola-

tion that he knows (whatever be the practical

issue) will come from violating the code of his race.

114

< MACBETH '

The social instincts are strong in him. With all

his pride and egoism, and despite the vein of hard-

ness that must always have been in his nature, he

has a deep craving to be at one with his fellow-

man. At the end, much of his despair arises from

the thought that he has forfeited for ever the trust

and goodwill of his kind :

I have lived long enough : my way of life

Is falPn into the sear, the yellow leaf,

And that which should accompany old age,

As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,

I must not look to have ; but, in their stead,

Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath

Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.

It is strange to hear the word " love " from the lips

of this murderer ; and yet the sanctities of life

have never been meaningless to Macbeth, as they

were, for example, to the Edmund of King Lear

:

the duty of the host to the guest, of the kinsman to

his senior, of the subject to his king. He feels these

ties, and the ties of gratitude as well, and has

never been able to say—as Richard III could

—

" I am myself alone."

But we know that a still deeper reluctance is

withholding him and that it comes from his ownconscience. He confesses to himself that the deed

he contemplates is without excuse or justification,

that he has no spur to prick the sides of his intent,

but only vaulting ambition, that the taking-off is a

deep damnation, that the horror of the act will

give the virtues of Duncan trumpet-tongued voices,

that pity will ride on the air and tears drown the

"5


wind. It would seem that none of the implications

of what he intends is hidden from him and that he

sees clearly that he is about to ruin his soul.

And yet, is it a true lucidity ? If it were, his

persistence in what he knows to be so vile would be

less intelligible. But Macbeth's mind works in a

special way. It is not remarkable for its grip or its

clarity ; it is remarkable for its vivid gleams of

intuition and for the emotional excitement with

which it can inflame his being. It is not a reflective

mind, and indeed from the beginning of the play

we notice in him a certain inaptitude for, or impa-

tience of, deliberation. He can never coolly think.

Rather, his half-formed purposes writhe in a murkyconfusion, and he is content that they should, for

he is afraid to inspect them :

Stars, hide your fires;

Let not light see my black and deep desires :

The eye wink at the hand . . .

Even the debate with his wife, when certain matters

must be acknowledged between them, hardly

clarifies for himself what he really desires, so that

it is, as it were, with a mind still but half made upthat he enters Duncan's chamber. All through

these critical moments the artificiality of his moodcan be felt. From his flat " We will proceed no

further in this business," he has screwed himself,

under his wife's tauntings, to the resolve :

I am settled, and bend upEach corporal agent to this terrible feat.

But it is an unnatural, an inflamed resolve. The

116

' MACBETH '

vision of the dagger is an indication of the brain" heat-oppressed," and the whole soliloquy shows

his overwrought state. One aspect of this soliloquy

seems especially interesting. We have heard how a

soldier in a time of approaching crisis—such as the" zero " moment for an attack—will often observe

in himself a quite unwonted mental activity, as if

all his faculties had suddenly received stimulation.

Is it not rather like that with Macbeth, as he waits ?

His imagination is always quick, we know, but at

such times it acquires an almost preternatural

intensity. During these last seconds before the

deed he becomes vividly aware, not only of the

necessities immediately ahead of him, but of details

that have, in a practical sense, no relevance to the

act he intends. His awareness is indeed for the

time being that of a poet, and he appreciates with a

curious exhilaration the artistic Tightness of the

role he is about to play, for it seems to his heightened

fancy to be required by the hour and the place.

Just as, at a later point in the drama, he feels the" thickening light "—with the crow making wingto the rooky wood and good things of day beginning

to droop and drowse—as united in a sinister har-

mony with the doom he has prepared for Banquo,so now the silence of the castle, the " curtain'd

sleep " abused by " wicked dreams," the dark, the

witchcraft abroad—all seem waiting for his act, andthe bell that suddenly sounds in the stillness comesto his imagination as the summons. In this exalted

mood he is nerved for the crime.

But the reaction is fearful. His words as he re-

117


enters after the murder have lost their excited ring;

instead, a terrible flatness has come into them. Helooks half stupidly at his blood-stained hands :

" This is a sorry sight " : and perplexes himself

with the problem why he could not say " Amen ' :

when the two who had been roused from their

sleep cried " God bless us !" Shakespeare's inven-

tive powers are at their very height all through this

scene and are nowhere more marvellously exhibited

than in these two or three lines. What fatuity it is

for Macbeth to stand—at such a moment—studying

a question like that ! He will not give it up, but

gnaws and gnaws upon it :

But wherefore could not I pronounce Amen ?

It is idiotic and—to his wife—exasperating, yet even

she, for all her impatience, catches a glimmer of

some dreadful import behind this futile harping ona word, and is momentarily dismayed. His nerve,

too, is now so completely gone that he cannot return

to the room with the daggers ; and disillusionment

is already flooding in :

Wake Duncan with thy knocking ! I would thoucouldst !

Between the last two scenes of the second act, andbetween that act and the third, some time elapses,

and the change after the interval in both Macbethand Lady Macbeth is very marked. The alteration

in Macbeth (now King of Scotland) is chiefly that

he has hardened. How little, after all, his wife

understood of the tremendous strength in her hus-

118

< MACBETH '

band, how she miscalculated the forces in his nature

that she was unlocking ! Her own vitality is already

at the ebb, but he has revived his powers and is

fresh in resolution. It is partly that he cannot rest.

Thoughts of Banquo and of possible frustration

from this quarter fill his mind with " scorpions,"

and he is determined, now that he is committedbeyond any chance of retreat to his evil path, to

follow it to whatever finish it may have. Ratherthan see Banquo (or Banquo's issue) get the better

of him,

come fate into the list,

And champion me to the utterance !

" To the utterance !" He will go to the bitter end.

The second murder is left half accomplished, for the

son escapes, and " rancours " still remain in the

vessel of Macbeth's peace. But there is no thought

now of relinquishing his objective ; such checks

are but a spur to renewed effort. Even his lapse at

the banquet he can explain, after his aberration is

past, as merely " the initiate fear that wants hard

use." Lady Macbeth must have felt the irony in

such words. He encourages her :" We are yet

but young in deed." " Young !

"—to this worn-out

woman, already a shadow of her former self. But

it is true of him ; he is only now, in his desperation,

beginning to draw on his reserves of strength, andthey seem inexhaustible.

For by this time a new vein has come into his

conduct, that of recklessness. We understand the

development easily : it is, in part, that he has

"9


nothing further to lose. What in his heart of hearts

he always valued most, though he has tried not to

acknowledge the truth to himself, was the eternal

jewel of his good conscience, and this he has lost

for ever. As for further calamities, can anything

that may come be worse than the terrible dreamsthat inflict nightly torment ? Better be with the

dead than continue in such a life. Besides, he is

now so deep in blood that it is as easy to go on as to

stand still or to return. Violence, and yet moreviolence, seems his only course : at the least, it is

an outlet for the fever within him, does something

to still the terrible restlessness of his spirit. So he

inaugurates with the slaughter of Macduff's wife

and children his new policy of utter savagery ; each

cruel impulse is now to be gratified with instant

performance : he has done with " scanning " for

ever.

In the last act he has changed still further andsigns of the final disintegration are evident. His

nerves are now nearly out of control ; we feel, as

we watch him irritably receiving the messengers,

that his doom is near, that he is indeed (as Malcolmputs it) " ripe for shaking." He is preoccupied with

omens, seems more than ever under the dominion

of the prophecies : he rests his confidence now in

Birnam wood which, in the way of nature, cannot

remove to Dunsinane. He obstinately insists that

he be clad in his armour, though Seyton assures

him " 'tis not needed yet," and we see that his

attendants have a difficult time equipping him. Heis plainly near the breaking point. The cry of

120

< MACBETH '

women, the news that his wife is dead, have not the

power at the moment to affect him ; he must post-

pone his grief, for now all but the crucial fight

ahead is an irrelevance. Yet even in these frenzied

minutes of preparation, with half his mind he can

survey in retrospect the course of his life, taking in

its meaning and estimating, once and for all, the

vanity of the deed by which he had thought to

glorify it :

Out, out, brief candle !

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more : it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

Signifying nothing.

He has really, whatever be the issue of the approach-

ing test, no hope left, but—it is a touch of the tragic

greatness in him—he will go to his destruction

fighting. It is now that the messenger enters with

the news that Birnam wood is on the move ; if the

report is true, then all is over ; but the probability

only increases his recklessness :

Blow, wind ! Come, wrack !

At least we'll die with harness on our back.

With this defiant shout he goes forth to his fate.

The combat with Macduff does a little more than

provide the formal conclusion to the story : it

illuminates once again, and finally, the essential

nature of the man. When Lady Macbeth taunted

her husband with cowardice, she took a ready wayto cure him of his " infirmity of purpose," but her

121


accusation was unfair. His courage, for all earthly

situations, is beyond every question :

What man dare, I dare :

Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear,

The arm'd rhinoceros, or the Hyrcan tiger ;

Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves

Shall never tremble.

But, compact of imagination as he is, this man(whose senses would cool at a night-shriek, whosefell of hair would rise at a dismal treatise) cannot

maintain his staunchness in face of horrors that

seem outside nature : his mind is too excitable

and intense, too vivid in its workings, for that kind

of courage. So it is that for a moment or two again

in this last fight with Macduff (as before when the

ghost of Banquo appeared) his valour deserts him.

At the beginning of the encounter he is admirable,

and, in the compunction he shows, reveals a little

(we may imagine) of the soldierly magnanimity of

better days. Believing that his antagonist has nochance against him, and feeling an impulse of con-

trition for what is past, he warns him away :

Of all men else I have avoided thee :

But get thee back ; my soul is too much charg'dWith blood of thine already :

and, as Macduff refuses to retreat, explains that his

life is charmed against all of women born. Then he

is undeceived—Macduff is the very man he has to

fear—and for an instant, as this last assurance gives

way and the fiends themselves seem to be jeering

at him, his courage ebbs :" I'll not fight with thee,"

122

' MACBETH

'

personally ambitious, at least that it was for his

glory that she chiefly strove. Her contempt andcastigation were for the ignoble scruples that seemed

to be keeping him from the " golden round," his

due. And now that her mistake is revealed she

makes what reparation is possible by care andconcern and the support of her own invincible will

when unearthly terrors sap his, a true helpmate,

according to her vision, to the end.

It remains to say a word of Banquo, whose story

furnishes a subordinate, ironical counterpart to that

of Macbeth himself. At the beginning no one could

have seemed more secure than he. He is a man (as

Macbeth tells us) at once courageous and prudent,

a man whose decent and dauntless nature has some-

thing of" royalty " in it, a man to be respected, and,

if his opposition should be aroused, to be feared.

His conduct when we first meet him illustrates, in

part, this tribute. The witches disturb him not a

whit ; indeed, his bearing was so fearless, his

challenge so bold, that Macbeth (when he recalls

the scene) says that he " chid the sisters." It is plain,

at least, that they produced no slightest feeling of

awe in him, and, as for being " solicited " by their

words, no trace of such a thought entered his mind.

And yet we may discern in this early scene, if welook closely, the beginning of the end, the scarcely

visible speck that will later corrupt his being. He is

a little vexed that the sisters have not included himin their predictions : "to me you speak not "

;

perhaps vexed is too strong a term : it is a whimsical

129


pretence of jealousy, or less, and is followed bywords that have in them a genuinely " royal " ring :

Speak then to me, who neither beg nor fear

Your favours nor your hate.

Nevertheless, he has drawn the comparison, howeverlightly ; a thought has lodged in his mind that wasnever there before. He continues, through the

scene, to treat the matter carelessly, and whenMacbeth asks him, as ifthe possibility really deserved

consideration :" Do you not hope your children

shall be kings ? " seems to chaff his friend for the

undue seriousness with which he is taking the

prophecies :

That, trusted home,Might yet enkindle you unto the crownBeside the thane of Cawdor.

Yet he confesses in his next words that such events

do sometimes have a weightier import :

But 'tis strange :

And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,The instruments of darkness tell us truths,

Win us with honest trifles, to betray's

In deepest consequence.

The history of Banquo (like that of so many aninteresting minor character in Shakespeare) has

perforce to be given intermittently. When we see

him again, at the beginning of the second act, there

has been a leap in his progress ; he is much changed,

ill at ease and depressed :

A heavy summons lies like lead upon me,And yet I would not sleep :

130

' MACBETH

'

for sleep itself, because of " cursed thoughts," can

yield him no rest. What has happened to the tran-

quil-minded, self-possessed Banquo of the first act ?

We learn presently, when without introduction he

says to Macbeth :

I dreamt last night of the three weird sisters,

adding,

To you they have show'd some truth.

That last remark is very significant : it is clear that

long trains of thought lie behind it. Banquo has

been brooding over the strange encounter, specu-

lating on what meaning it may have, wondering

(despite his initial disdain and incredulity) how he

himselfmay be involved. The little speck has begunto spread : Banquo 5

s clear mind is darkening.

His reply, when Macbeth proceeds to make the

ambiguous overture to him, is as dauntless as ever,

for he is not at all the kind of man to be intimidated

into adopting a line of policy of which he dis-

approves ; and in any case, whatever be the part

intended for him by destiny, it can hardly require

much immediate action : his must necessarily bethe waiting game. Still, his choice is not the less

definite for that. The murder takes place, and he

has so much of the evidence in his hands that in a

flash he must have assigned the guilt. He says

hardly anything during the scene of the discovery,

but before it finishes makes one notable speech

:

In the great hand of God I stand, and thenceAgainst the undivulg'd pretence I fight

Of treasonous malice.

I3i


It is a declaration with a threat in it—has the ring

indeed of an ultimatum—and we may imagine that

while he uttered it his gaze was directed at the thane

of Cawdor. Banquo is still fearless, still to be

reckoned with.

But the sequel disappoints our expectations. Wefind that, after all, he took no stand, but was content

to drift ; or even, that he assisted the current of

events. His duties are knit to his new sovereign" with a most indissoluble tie," and yet he is per-

suaded that this sovereign is the murderer ofDuncan.The reason of his silence he almost avows. So the

temptation has proved too much for Banquo. Wemay guess that if one positive act of evil had been

demanded of him he would not have performed it ;

but his way was made too easy : he had simply to

acquiesce in the evil deeds of another.

The fates of the two men are ironically contrasted.

Macbeth risked everything on his great throw, andat his finish is not deprived of a certain sublimity.

Banquo, though no coward, has played safely, andreceives his ignoble reward :

safe in a ditch he bides,

With twenty trenched gashes on his head.

132

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The essays making this volume were written

primarily as lectures—two of them for popular

audiences—and have been altered only slightly from

the lecture form. The last three have appeared as

pamphlets of the Australian English Association,

Sydney. I am obliged to the Sydney University

Extension Board for permission to reprint the

second.

A. J. A. W.

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